Time machine transfer

I recently swapped hard drives between two MacBooks...one's our stream-to-TV MacBook, other one is the main one we use, and we swapped which MacBook does what...
But here's the question. It's all working nicely, all files OK, but Time Machine, which is backing up to an external HD on our Airport Extreme, doesn't recognize the old backup, instead has renamed the old sparsebundle and is starting the slow process of making a new backup.
How do I get Time Machine to back up to the old sparsebundle? Or can I? (if not, I will hook up directly to the disk to get the new backup going faster...)
thanks
ck

ckuttner wrote:
Time Machine, which is backing up to an external HD on our Airport Extreme
I hate to have to tell you this, but backing-up that way is often unreliable and not supported by Apple.   See:  Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk.
doesn't recognize the old backup, instead has renamed the old sparsebundle and is starting the slow process of making a new backup.
You have two situations here:
• Time Machine keeps track of a Mac by a hardware id.  So it's backing-up to the correct sparsebundle, but the  OSX drive has the old Computer Name, so TM has changed it.  You can fix that easily by just changing the Computer name via System Preferences > Sharing.  Time Machine will change the sparsebundle name on the next backup.
• Time Machine keeps track of drives & partitions by their UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifiers), not the name.  So it knows the new drive is a different one from the one it's been backing-up, so it's doing a full backup of the new drive.
Assuming the two drives have significant differences (3rd-party apps, user accounts, data, etc.), that's probably what you want to happen.  If necessary, you can see and restore from the backups of the old disk via the procedure in the green box of #E3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
If the data and user accounts are mostly the same, you could tell TM to "associate" the new disk with the old backups, per #B6 in the same link.  That will make all the old backups look like they were made from the new disk, and just back up the differences.

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