Time machine moved, issues

I had a standalone drive that was attached via firewire to my MacBook Pro. Worked fine. Decided to move to to my Airport Extreme via USB so I don't have to hook it up to do a back up. It found the drive, but didn't recognize any of the old backups, is doing what appears to be a complete backup as I type.

When I opened the drive, it appeared all the old backups were there. I'm concerned that something's not right here.

Recommendations?

Anybody?

It is doing a complete backup but there is nothing "wrong" in the sense of something horrible happening. I believe the root of the problem lies in a difference in the way Time Machine stores the backups.

When a Time Machine drive is directly connected to a Mac as yours was the backups are stored in a folder structure like the ones you saw when you noticed the backups were there. When connected to an Airport, Time Capsule, or similar device the backups are stored in a folder structure inside of a type of image file called a sparsebundle. In essence TM is treating these as different backups.

The page How can I copy my TM backups to a different location? may help straighten things out. When you get to the How To Section check out part 3 moving from local to Network
Note that since your drive is already formatted for TM use you should not need to format again.

Wow, thanks for the link!

It seems that it can be done, but I'm not following much of the discussion.

It appears as though this discussion is geared towards moving the backups to a new drive. I don't wish to do that nor do I have a second drive available...I just want to change how my current Time Machine drive is connected.

The issue is that when I tried to move the files I was told they were not formatted the same. According to this web site, that requires a reformat...since it's the same drive, I can't do that.

Am I stuck here until I can get a new drive?

INteresting...I just dug around some through some Apple support forums and found the following:

...backing-up to a USB drive attached to an Airport Extreme is not reliable and not supported by Apple.

Click to expand...

So, looks like I should move the drive back to firewire. Rats. My neighbor keeps swearing by the convenience of a wireless backup setup. I don't have enough space on my NAS until I add a couple of more drives.

<sigh>

It was true at one time that backup to an Airport Extreme was not supported. That appears to have changed with some recent firmware updates Airport Extreme and Time Machine - MacRumors Forums.

Apple has a tech article on their site about moving TM backups on their site that apparently works with 10.6. As soon as I find it again I''ll post it.

Thanks.