Time Machine Restores from Time Capsule after Tahoe

this part is great:

<< Ok thanks so I'll try and summarize my understanding from your posts. I can look to hardwire my existing TC to my Mac and continue to do TM backups as I have. In parallel and in a month down the road or so - can purchase a new external drive - connect that directly to my Mac - ADD as a new drive to TM and have TM backup to the new drive going forward. >>

Time Machine always looks at ALL attached drives (plus recent snapshots on the boot drive) when building a backup SET to Restore from. So if older and newer backup drives are still connected, they will be seen as ONE backup set.

When the Protocol for talking to the Time Capsule goes away, you wont's be able to talk to the Time Capsule. Not for additional backups. Not for Restores, unless still running Tahoe or older.

The BACKUP SET on the Time capsule DRIVE survives.

That Backup Set can continue to be used for the foreseeable future, PROVIDED you move it to an access method where it can be seen. You can use:

• a USB enclosure directly connected to your Mac.

• with some additional setup, you could move it to a different Mac on your network.

The mere fact that its Backups.backupdb file is inside a sparse bundle disk image will not change Time Machine's ability to access that backup set.

But you MUST get it OUT of the Time Capsule, because later MacOS can not talk to a Time Capsule.

The part that is going away is the protocol that talks between the Time Capsule and the Mac.

The drive itself contains a perfectly valid** Network Time Machine backup set, that could be connected differently to do a restore. So you could remove the drive and place it in a USB enclosure, directly-connected to your Mac.

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**. Senior Contributor John Galt has suggested that this backup set might not always be recognized automatically under certain circumstances for doing a Full Restore.

My (possibly flawed) understanding is that this may not work under the most Primitive circumstances, such as Setup Assistant. I believe that with MacOS up fully and running, it would be recognized for use with Migration Assistant.

>> Readers with a better understanding of this issue than I are encouraged to add their insights and corrections.

The BIG SURPRISE may come when you advance to a MacOS after Tahoe, and there is no support for that Protocol. In that case, the "perfectly good" backup set has become unreachable, because the protocol to talk to the Time Capsule has been removed.

In that case, move the Time Capsule DRIVE to a USB enclosure, and connect it directly to your Mac. Then that Network Backup Set should be usable in an ordinary way.

if you expect to be in that situation, it would be prudent to move the drive BEFORE you lose Time Capsule access to it, and "inherit" the backup set and use it for a while.

<< at some point down the road can move the required backup file(s) to a new external drive and go through that process of moving TM to a new drive - which will go forward and be applicable after Tahoe ? >>

Moving Time Machine backups is a Bad Idea™.

When you MOVE a backup set to a different drive, you risk introducing Errors, which can make the entire backup set unusable.

Time Machine is perfectly happy to ADD an additional backup drive, staring today. Then every-other backup is written to every-other drive. Each drive remains a complete stand-alone backup set, differing only by the length of its History. Any drive can be removed at any time, and stored or repurposed.

<< instead has a MacBookPro.backupbundle file. >>

A sparsebundle disk image file is a complete MacOS Disk Image inside a single file on the Server. It is used on EVERY Network backup set, so that the Native file system of the Server becomes a "don't care".

if you want to explore further, and you have a few minutes, you could double-click on the sparse bundle file, and the sparse bundle Disk Image will be Mounted as a Disk Image, and can be examined. It takes several minutes to Mount.

NB>> DO NOT MODIFY files on Time Machine volumes, EVER!