Apple fixed Time Machine in Snow Leopard!
Elizabeth’s laptop died. She had been using our Time Capsule under Leopard. After receiving the new Snow Leopard based machine, I used the migration assistant to restore her machine.
Now she is on Snow Leopard. After awhile, the Mac asked her if she wanted to reuse her existing backup! Before, you’d have to make an all new Time Machine backup, thus wasting space.
The dialog informed us that if she reused the backup, she’d no longer be able to access it from the old machine, which is fine.
So it looks like they did indeed change Time Machine to allow backups to be extended from a previous machine. Very nice!
Now will it backup the entire machine, or be smart about it? Only time will tell. I’ll update this post when I find out.
Update:
Time Machine did do a complete backup, not matching existing files, but it kept the history of the machine, all the way back to Nov. 2008!