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I'm about to upgrade to lion and at some point in the future I might want to restore back to a snow leopard time machine backup.

However, recently my first time backups have been overwritten.

Is there any way I can preserve a backup so it won't get overwritten ?

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i Thinking locking the folder from the desired date might work, but i'm not sure how time machine will handle it – XAleXOwnZX Dec 25 '11 at 18:54
This isn't really the right way to save a restoration point to an old OS. The better way is to do a full CarbonCopyCloner clone of your Snow Leopard drive to a new drive, put that on your shelf, and use that to restore your system should you ever want to go back to Snow Leopard. – Ian C.♦ Jan 2 '12 at 17:45
I also really like just setting aside my Time Machine volumes periodically or using Disk Utility to clone them onto a bare SATA drive and place that in storage labeled with the machines and date ranges and wiping the current drive for a clean start. – bmike♦ Jan 3 '12 at 0:32

1 Answer

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No - Time Machine has set permissions on the drive and has full root access to delete any and all backups that the algorithm feels needs to be deleted.

You get warned after the deletion happens, so you will need to copy that snapshot to another drive or outside the Backups.backupdb folder on that drive to ensure Time Machine won't delete it.

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