OS X Time Machine Backups - Merging

ThirdLeft152

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 31, 2008
Messages
166
Hey all,

Been a while but I am lost for solutions and have been messing with different methods and disks/file systems and so forth.

Issue: I have 2 backup disk for my Macbook Air and would like to merge them all together onto a single larger disk.
1st backup - resides on an apple time capsule (in a Sparse Bundle since it's a network backup) in an HFS Case-senseitive Not Journaled file system (default for time machine using an apple time capsule).
2nd backup - resides on a 256GB usb drive. It is formated Mac OS Extended

I have tried simply restoring the time capsule sparse bundle in disk utility to the new 2TB external and then simply copying the data out of the smaller 256GB drive Backups.backupdb onto the new disk. But it appears im having hard link and hard folder link issues. Makes sense seeing as how these two backups never knew the other existed although from the same machine and similar data.

I have also tried using SuperDuper! to copy the data out of the Backups.backupdb folders on both backups on a new drive with no luck.

Any suggestions?
 
Why don't you just start a new backup from a fresh disk? Then when you see it's successful, format the old or keep one as off-site backup. Off-site is always recommended in case of fire or ransomware.
 
It looks like after a few weeks of testing and research, after reaching out here on [H], I may have to settle for that solution. I already keep offsite backups (cloud), but I'd like to access the Time Machine backups in the TM application natively on the OS. Not sure you can browse them in the TM app unless the backup store is configured as a backup location in TM.

Should also note that my 2nd backup database on the 256GB flash drive appears corrupt. When I mount in OS X it does a check and mounts read-only. So some of my issues of copying/merging the data could be due to that as well?
 
Cloud is not really an offsite backup as long as your computer can access it. Ransomware will happily encrypt your cloud backups also.
 
Ok then you're probably safe as long as nobody attacks you manually after infection...

My machine doesn't have direct file system access to my backups so I am not worried about it. Been using computers and administering server environments for a long time now. Just haven't really ever used TM in a professional environment but the way everything is going Macs are extremely commonplace now. Execs and programmers are specifically requesting them these days so I'm also using this as a learning experience. Plus I always like to add a bit of knowledge to my digital forensic knowledge base.
 
My machine doesn't have direct file system access to my backups so I am not worried about it. Been using computers and administering server environments for a long time now. Just haven't really ever used TM in a professional environment but the way everything is going Macs are extremely commonplace now. Execs and programmers are specifically requesting them these days so I'm also using this as a learning experience. Plus I always like to add a bit of knowledge to my digital forensic knowledge base.
My company went 100% Mac/Linux already over 10 years ago and never looked back. Computer related problems reduced to a fraction. Hardware costs more than doubled but productivity increase more than paid that back.
 
My company went 100% Mac/Linux already over 10 years ago and never looked back. Computer related problems reduced to a fraction. Hardware costs more than doubled but productivity increase more than paid that back.

My server environments are predominately linux however we still have a few legacy systems running on windows, unfortunately. I personally have been running Mac/Linux for about that long, aside from my gaming rig (OLD but still works) of course.
 
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