Moving TM Drive to New Mac

I've been backing up from my MacBook Pro to a wired drive for a while. I've just got myself a Mac Mini and plugged the drive in there instead. I'm trying to carry on using the same Time Machine backup for the MBP wirelessly, with mixed success so far.
I've shared the drive and pointed the MBP to its new place, and it's accepted it, although I haven't allowed it to start a backup yet as I wanted to make sure I could access the old ones first. When I enter Time Machine it says the current backup can't be found and gives me the option to select either the "old" one for the MBP, or the new mini's backup. So I'm sort of half way there, but I'm worried about this step of having to point it to the old one because the "current one can't be found." I'm wondering if this means it will insist on starting a new backup for the MBP from scratch, which will take a long time over wireless, not to mention taking up several dozen gigabytes somewhat unnecessarily.
Any advice will be appreciated

I got started with a solution from your article, perhaps someone can help me get over the next hurdle!
By starting a new backup over the network and cancelling it after "preparing," I got my blank sparsebundle, and decided to try moving my old backups to the sparsebundle ... simple idea in theory, but I'm getting help up by an "error code -50". I've seen solutions to this error when you want to copy it from one HD to another HD, but nothing for copying from a folder to a sparsebundle disk image. Can I get any help getting over it?
The other problem is I've found that if I decide to start a new one from scratch (which is a giant pain), plugging back in via USB to finish the first backup in good time won't work because it'll default to the old backup on in the Backups folder rather than the sparsebundle. I don't under any circumstances want to delete the old backup, it still needs to be accessible.
So I seem a bit stuck whatever I do... any help is as appreciated as ever

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