Time Machine on New Mac

[tflint]

So the screen on my iMac went bad on me over the weekend and I bought a new MBP today. I will be transfering all the files from the iMac to the new MBP using Migration Assistant. Does anybody know how Time Machine is going to work with this? is it going to a new complete copy of the hard drive? That would be a huge waste if the available space on my Time Capsule. What I would like do to is just keep going with the backups I already have and only have changes backed up. Can anybody shed some light on how this works?

 

[JediMeister]

Migrating from a Time Machine backup is the way to go. I don't think you can even restore from backup one Mac from the backup of another, would cause a bit of mayhem if it loaded wrong drivers and whatnot. After migrating, if you select the Time Capsule as the backup destination, it will create a separate sparsebundle for the new computer when it does an initial backup. There is no way to my understanding that allows you to link MacBook Pro's backups to the existing sparsebundle. My recommendation would be to, after finishing the migration and initial setup of the MacBook Pro, access AirPort Utility and format the Time Capsule's hard drive and start anew, unless you're planning to get the iMac repaired and want to preserve its sparsebundle for some reason or have the Time Capsule set up as a fileserver of sorts. If you try to delete the sparsebundle from a client computer it will either cause the Finder to hang or just outright quit unexpectedly.