how to Transfer Time Machine

[MacInWin]

Rod, if I may, the definition of archive, from dictionary.com says this:

a long-term storage device, as a disk or magnetic tape, or a computer directory or folder that contains copies of files for backup or future reference.

Apple describes Time Machine with this:

You can use Time Machine, the built-in backup feature of your Mac, to automatically back up all of your files, including apps, music, photos, email, documents, and system files. When you have a backup, you can restore files from your backup if the original files are ever deleted from your Mac, or the hard disk (or SSD) in your Mac is erased or replaced.

From those two statements, it would seem to me that Time Machine quintessentially an archive for a Mac's data.

Cloners, such as CCC or SD, and synchronizers like Chronosync can be configured to both clone and archive, but TM is designed to do both inherently.

Just my $0.02.

As for how long one uses any given archive, that is a personal or business decision. From my observation over 40 years in the technology business, the storage devices and technology change so dynamically that any long term storage would need to be refreshed every few years. In the personal computer space, the cassette tape was replaced by floppy disk, then Winchester hard drives, then just hard drives in general, then storage cards, now external SSDs. But storage decays over time, so a true archive needs to be refreshed and moved to more modern storage. I seriously doubt many of us could restore data from a cassette tape today, even if the interface between the player and the machine could be created. And does anybody use the old compact flash cards any more? You know, the original 1.24" by 1.5" cards. And if you have an old IDE, PATA, or SCSI hard drive, getting it attached to today's machines is not a trivial task.

So as technology moves along, what I do is to move my "archive" stuff to newer tech. I had photos that I stored on CF cards from the camera in which they were taken, moved them to the hard drives of the day, copied them to backup drives in case one failed. When drives went from PATA to SATA, I moved the photos to there for storage and access. Now I have them stored on RAID array in a NAS, backed up to a second RAID array NAS. One moves with the times.

 

[Rod]

Yes the tech certainly has changed. Your first quoted definition hits the nail on the head though, "a long term storage device," so I suppose it depends on what one defines as "long term". I have digitalised photos of my wedding, 41 years ago today, saved on a dedicated Photos HD but I create a new TM backup (after erasing the old one) at each new macOS version.

About 10 years ago I tried to simplify my daughter's backups by buying her a 1Tb (big then) AC powered external HD to backup her old MBP. The idea was she could just plug it in and allow TM to run whenever and she would never have to worry about her laptop crashing. This was as it turned out a simplistic and erroneous assumption. Changes in OS versions, filing systems, native apps including TM itself rendered the thing useless when the time came to use it. Many files were corrupted or unreadable and many photos were reduced to thumbnails only. It took days to save the data that could be saved.
Now she saves her photos as jpegs onto dedicated HD's labelled by year, not data bases or application libraries. That in my mind is an archive.

 

[MacInWin]

Yep, Rod, that is one of the definitions of an archive. I would, however, caution your daughter to occasionally review those archives for readability and if there are ANY issues, immediately copy the archive to new hardware.

On my soapbox...

Backup and archiving are never one-and-done, or set-and-forget. In my past I was the head of major data centers and we had an active backup policy that made backups, tested that they worked, stored them offsite, rotated the media and tested it between uses, made multiple copies and ensure that we had install media for all operating system and third party components, plus all dedicated application source code to rebuild the system in emergency. We even had a data-center-in-a-box (DCIAB) where we had everything but the hardware to re-establish the center in case of emergency. As a military facility, we could have authority to commandeer a center similar to ours in a national emergency, take the DCIAB there and run our system until we could be restored.

So a backup plan is not static, but dynamic. A backup that won't boot is useless if you planned for it to boot. Useless if you cannot read the files you need/want to restore. And the only way to know it is not useless is to test it, and test it regularly.

Off my soapbox, thanks for listening...

 

[Rod]

I definitely advocate reviewing, that was the problem in the first instance. Keeping it plain and simple, folders and subfolders.
I keep all my text files in MS Word format, photos as tiff or jpeg.