[kennedy]

Ugh! So, I got a new MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard... I let Migration Assistant suck over my accounts and data from my old MacBook Pro running Leopard... seemed to work great... UNTIL I tried to hook my Time Machine drive up. It happily uses the disk, but it is NOT using the existing backup and just backing up the files that got changed by the upgrade (like my iPhoto library)... instead, its trying to create a completely new backup on the drive. Ack!

From researching this, evidently the issue is that the time machine records the MAC address which is, of course, different on my new machine. I've found instructions on how to update that MAC address on the Time Machine... but the fsaclctl command no longer exists in Snow Leopard. And so far, I haven't found new instructions for Snow Leopard.

And no, it didn't just ask me if I want to use the old Time Machine as some claimed it did for them. Probably because the Migration Assistant failed to use my old hard drive's name, leaving it "Macintosh HD" instead. I've changed it to what it was named on my old machine, but still no go.

Advice?

[Doc HM]

When you migrate to new Mac running SL, Time Machine will ask you if you want to reuse the existing backup or create a new one. If you choose to reuse the existing backup then your Mac will just add to this backup file. However it does rather tend to start off with an almost complete backup again. I imagine because it treats almost every file as having been changed. While this takes a long time (especially over wireless) you do get to keep the archive over time.

It does sound like something has gone amiss if it's asked if you want to reuse the backup and is still creating a new file.

[kennedy]

It never asked if I want to use the old backup.
I never got that question. When I manually told it to backup, it just started with a brand new folder, ignoring the old folder. Bad Mac OS X!

I am tempted to just start again from scratch... though I may lose a few emails (that I've loaded since).

[Mac Write]

First off, you can do File>archive e-mail. Now re-install and then you can do "restore from Time Machine." Then I assume it should continue to backup where toy left off. Make sure of course you have the latest backup/time machine of your old computer.