Yet Another quesstion about moving Time Machine backups

I have a NAS drive used to back up 3 Macs.  In order to upgrade to a RAID drive, I need to reformat the existing drive (along with the new drive I'm adding to the enclosure) - but that would obviously lose the existing backups. I had planned to move them to another NAS drive that I have, reformat, then move them back.
All the discussions I've seen involve reformatting the target drive (which is not a Time Capsule, but a Buffalo NAS).
I can't do that, because I have lots of archive data  (not backed up by time machine) on that disk I'll be using only temporarily.
So, how can I temporarily move the sparsebundle without buying yet another drive?

I recommend doing as I suggested. Cloning is the only correct way to backup a Time Machine backup drive. If you have data on the other drive you don't wish to lose then create a new partition on that drive. See the following:
To resize the drive do the following:
1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list.
2. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.  (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss.  Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.

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    Message was edited by: Bob Timmons

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    Dark Heart wrote:
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    I'm not sure what you mean by that: you cannot combine the backups of two different Macs. You can put them both on the same hard drive, either in two different partitions, or, if any are going to be backed-up over a network, in a sparse bundle.
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