Mac – How to reassociate Time Machine backup with the computer

backupmactime-machine

I was taking taking time machine backup on a network drive in a sparsebundle image. In order to use another usb HDD (exfat) to take backup I ran the commands explained here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20140415132734925

Now the previous backup destination is deassociated with the Time Machine and when I appended this (network) destination again using follwoing command it starts backing up from the scratch (first backup)

sudo tmutil setdestination -a  '/Volumes/MacBook-Backup/'

Can anyone tell me how do I reassociate the network sparsebundle the the my Mac as it has latest backup.

Best Answer

sudo tmutil inheritbackup "/path/to/backup.sparsebundle"

Machine directories and sparsebundles are owned by one computer at a time, and are tracked by unique identifiers rather than computer name, host name, or ethernet address. The inheritbackup verb reassigns the identity of the specified item, reconfiguring it so the current host recognizes it during backups. When inheriting a sparsebundle, the machine directory within will also be claimed.

This performs automatic inheritance of the computer and disk backups located within. This may not function correctly. If not, you may need to manually associate the disk within the backup with your current disk.

sudo tmutil associatedisk -a "/" "/Volumes/backupdisk/Backups.backupdb/computername/Latest/localdiskname"

The -a option tells associatedisk to find all snapshot volumes in the same machine directory that match the identity of MyStuff, and then perform the association on all of them.

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