Move Time Machine volumes to anther drive and have them not lose backups/data. I recently bought a Seagate 500GB Expansion drive (Amazon Lightning Deal for $65). I first tried Disk Utility's Restore function to clone the TM volume from one drive to the new one, but it wouldn't do it, stating that that operation was not allowed (permissions on the new drive?), but the old, tried and true, drag and drop method worked flawlessly. Now, I just need to save up for that 7200 RPM Seagate 250 GB internal drive for the Mini. Still gotta move some things among the drives in prep for that, too.

Cool.
Always seems the best method is usually the easiest.
Gotta love Apple.
Thanks for the tip.

Simply dragged and dropped the Backups.backupdb folder to the new drive, designated it as the TM volume, and voila!

Have you tried a backup? Does it actually recognize the backups or did it start a whole new backup?

Enter time Machine and see if previous dates show up on the timeline.

Thx.

As soon as I designated it as the TM volume, it started a backup (incremental) and ID'd it as the previous backup volume with the correct listing of oldest and most recent backups (after the new, incremental bu completed). TM is happy with it.

As long as it has the same machine ID it should work.

This is interesting:

The DMG (the .sparsebundle) of my wife's TM backup is formatted case-sensitive, journaled. My TM backup is not (not even a .sparsebundle for it). I'm assuming that it is because the volume for her backup is physically attached to my Mini and is accessed over the network from her Mini while my TM backup is directly to the volume attached to my Mini rather than via network access. Is there any problem of formatting the eventual HD that will be her dedicated TM volume (directly connected to her Mini) as Case-sensitive so that I can simply copy the backups.backupdb to it from the mounted disk image?

Yes, sparsebundle for networked backups.

Don't know about the case-sensitive copying/transferring TM backups from her machine sparsebundle thing though.

Like NG4 mentioned about machine IDs there is some voodoo there, but I have never run across the need, I just start over. I have never felt a need to worry about past data. If in doubt I keep it. :-D

I'm just interested in a fail safe backup from an hour ago with TM, and a bootable day or so with SuperDuper. With my clients no one thinks it's worth the money to transfer, they just want a backup so I haven't had to mess with it.

So like I said I know there is voodoo to doodoo it right. Oddly I just haven't had to yet, so I am interested in your results. Still wondering if yours is backing up from the same point, does the time line for past dates show, and are you able to get to an older date and recover something when you enter Time Machine.

Come to think of it now formatting the HD as case sensitive won't make TM use it like a local drive. It probably will want to make new sparsebundle.

I don't know for sure why they use them but my guess is that to overcome network interruptions since they use checksums. Maybe permission issues too.

Looking around it seems Disk Utility does a good job with its restore function to copy drive to drive.

Yes, time line is intact. I've decided to leave her TM volume attached to my Mini rather than swapping drives between enclosures and moving one to her machine. It's just easier to keep it that way (and fewer questions from the wife).