TM to increment old backup with new mac

[berving]

I made a big backup with Time Machine for a few weeks and having a new mac, i would like Time Machine to continue incrementally making backups on that old one. (I have parts of that old backup that i don't want to erase.)
I have read somewhere that TM uses the MAC address to ID the computer and that there might be privileges and permissions involved - but i have gotten no further. is there a solution?

best regards,
tobias

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iMac 20" iSight, 2,16 GHZ, 2GB RAM, 500GB HD

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Time Machine is more of a "moving window" backup of your Mac -- it only stores files for so long, then they're gone. If a file is on your backup drive and NOT also on your Mac, then at some point in the future, the file will be removed from your backup drive to make room for new files that are actually on your Mac.

Time Machine is not meant to be a catch-all, save-all data kind of backup. It keeps backups for a few months to a year, at most, depending on your drive size and amount of activity.

What you are talking about can only be accomplished by reformatting your current Mac, then using the Mac OS X Install CD/DVD to re-install Leopard and opting to restore the data from the Time Machine backup onto your new Mac. Then, subsequent backups from your freshly-installed new Mac will just be incremental backups to the Time Machine drive (hopefully!).

Think of Time Machine as more of a "synchronizing" device, much like an iPod, rather than a true "backup" system. It keeps perfect, duplicate images of your computer's state for a period of time, so you can restore your system to any state it was in within the last xxx days/weeks/months. Eventually, though, as files disappear from your Mac, they will also, in the future, disappear from your backup.

The short answer is that, no, there isn't an "easy" way to do it. And don't keep files solely on your Time Machine drive that you want to keep indefinitely. You must have a copy of them somewhere else, otherwise, somewhere down the road, they will be deleted from the Time Machine backup.