macostime-capsuletime-machine
I have several Mac each with its own USB hard drive, holding a Time Machine Backup.
I am wondering if I can move all of them to a Time Capsule. I have seen tutorial about single time machine backup, and as I understood, it's not a standard or official procedure.
But I didn't see any tutorial or advice for moving more than one backup.
Don't know if it's relevant, all the backups have been made under Lion, then Mountain Lion, and Time Capsule will backup ML machine.
Enter TimeMachine, then in the main window, select the backup you want to delete (on the right), then use the Action Menu (Gear icon) to select "Delete Backup".
Using this menu, you can also, when a file or a folder is selected, delete all its backup.
You are correct. Time machine makes a sparse disk bundle to hold backups on Time Capsule and instead uses a folder for attached hard drives.
Due to the security settings on the backup files, it's not as easy or reliable, but here's how you could start:
See this macworld article for a version of the commands to disable and then re-enable the protection on the sparse bundle disk image. I haven't done this as I would rather not muck with the internals of Time Machine. I know I only have to connect the old hard drive to my mac to see all my old history. The risk of using old incorrect information isn't worth it to me - but that doesn't mean you don't have a good reason to move the files over. If I were to do this, I'd consult with a Apple technician as they gave me specific instructions on 10.5 when I had a MLB swap on how to migrate the old Time Capsule backups to work with the "new" mac. Do have a look at the end of the Time Machine lesson in Mac 101 There's a nice tip on option click of the Time Machine menu bar icon to view files on older volumes than the current one.
Good Luck
Best Answer
Finally, I decided to give a try by myself. I had no particular problem, I just followed the well known procedure of backup to Time Capsule, interrupt, and restore the USB drive to the Time Capsule sparsebundle related to the machine.
All my previous backup, have ben recognized. However, for 500GB of data I had to wait for two days to be completed.
Apparently, by matching the two .sparsebundle size, the data seemed to be transferred in a reasonable time from 4 to 7 hours. For the rest, it just seems that disk utility stopped doing nothing for the rest of the time.
Even the USB drive went in stand by mode for almost two days. Then, after two days, it just stop informing that the restore went fine.