Time Machine was designed as a backup system, which shares some requirements with but is not identical to a file versioning system. It sounds to me like what you're really looking for is the latter. To simplify my life, I would retire that drive as a backup drive and use it as an archive drive only. You can root around and it manually, but don't expect Time Machine to do anything meaningful with it.
> On Feb 15, 2017, at 8:13 PM, Michael <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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? > _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
