Mac – How to tell Timemachine that the Machine Dir has moved

time-capsuletime-machine

On my Mac, I used Time Machine to backup to a Drobo that was directly attached. I've now connected this Drobo to my TimeCapsule. I however want to continue backing up to the Drobo, not the TimeCapsule.

I have told the TimeCapsule to share its disks, and can mount the Drobo Disk fine, and it appears under /Volumes as "Drobo".

However, when I tell TimeCapsule to use the new disk, it does not recognize the presence of the old backups on the disks. Instead of using the machine directory present it starts a new sparsebundle. This is not what I want.

How do I get Time Machine to continue backing up in the original machine directory?

I've tried

tmutil inerhitbackup <machine dir>

but this didn't work… Anything else I can do?

Best Answer

I think I have found the answer. The following site was very helpful:

http://pondini.org/TM/18.html

There are important differences between how Time Machine backups to local disks, and tonetworked disks. In the first case the backup goes to a "Backups.backupdb directory, in the second case to a "sparsebundle".

So my solution will be:

  1. First have Timemachine start a new back up to my now networked Drobo.

  2. Interrupt the backup after the sparsebundle has been made.

  3. now move the Drobo temporarily back to my Mac, mount the sparse bundle, and use diskutil to erase it.

  4. Copy the existing back up in to the monted sparsebundle.

  5. Attach the Drobo again to the Time Capsule once this is finished.

However I can't try this out yet. First have to expand the disk space on my Drobo. So the first step for me really is: Get two 4TB disks on Monday...

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