On 2017-02-15, at 7:06 PM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]> wrote:

>> 
>> On Feb 15, 2017, at 5:40 PM, Macs R We <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Feb 15, 2017, at 4:47 PM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I want my new system to inherit my old system's TM archives.
>>> 
>>> So when I do a backup, it augments the existing archive, and doesn't make 
>>> an entirely new one from scratch, which would mean abandoning everything I 
>>> have archived.
> 
> Okay, thinking about this a little more deeply, yes, I don't actually need 
> the "all or nothing" perfect clone approach. But I do need access to the 
> years of archives that are there. If I can go manually hunt and peck around 
> for the files I need, I thought maybe TM could support it as a "static" or 
> "archaic" archive or something. That's not really so unreasonable, is it? 

You are asking for two very different goals here.

If you want to continue backing up on the existing backup, you can do that.

tmutil inheritbackup machine_directory

Archives are *NOT* defined by special UUID's. That was true in 10.5, and maybe 
in 10.6. I think it changed in 10.7; I know it is changed in 10.9.

BUT:

Your first backup will result in saying "These directories do not match", and 
most of your files will be backed up from the current machine. This will 
probably fill your drive, and it will delete some of your older backups -- very 
likely most or all of the years of archives that are there.

If your goal is to be able to restore files off those archives, that is 
different. You can treat them as just another read-only directory from finder, 
and look around. I think finder is smart enough that if you copy files out of a 
time machine archive, then it will remove the time-machine specific extended 
attributes and restore the normal ones if any.

So what is your goal here:
1. Look through the files and restore them as needed, or
2. Use it as a destination for backing up and deleting the old backups as 
needed to make new ones?

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