Cloning from a backup and Time Machine Weirdness

[isaac]

I have a single external drive that hosts both a bootable backup, and my time machine backups. I recently needed to do a clean format of my internal drive, so I rebooted from the backup, formated it with disk utility, and then proceeded to clone my backup back to my boot drive.

The first weird thing I noticed is that it started cloning the Backups.backupdb folder, i had to manually exclude it from the clone.

The rest of the clone went fine, and my computer boots fine off my internal drive again. But Time Machine is acting up - it has claimed my boot drive as a time machine disk, and I can't seem to get it to not see it as a valid backup. If I plug my external drive in, it works as it should, and the time machine preference pane shows the external drive as the destination. As soon as I eject the disk however, it immediately switches to my internal drive, and then fails when trying to run.

I'm guessing that if I change time machine to use "none" in the change disk, I can probably clear this out, but I'm trying to avoid having to start up a new set of backups - so my question is two fold.

1) Does anyone know how to get time machine to stop thinking my internal drive is a valid target?

2) Did I do something wrong when cloning back to my internal drive? Is this a known issue?, etc.

[dnanian]

That's what the "Restore..." script is for, Isaac. Let me suggest you restore from that instead, since I think you likely didn't exclude quite enough...

[isaac]

Thanks for the quick response.

I hadn't even noticed the restore script - I've just been using the backup script for years to do the same thing.

[dnanian]

Yes -- a totally reasonable thing to do until the side-by-side backup changed the game a bit.