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When I connected my Time Machine drive (previously used with my 2012 Intel Mac and formatted HFS+) to my new M4 Mac running Sequoia 15.2, I got a popup asking me what I wanted to do about the existing backups on the drive. I don't remember all the choices, but I wonder if I made the wrong choice. Here's a screen shot of the Time Machine driver in Finder:


"Andrew Buc's computer" is the old Mac, "Mac mini" is the new one. A problem soon cropped up: Time Machine doesn't recognize the legacy backups, and there's very little space on the drive for new ones. Time Machine made 3 backups and refuses to make any more. I thought Time Machine would seamlessly delete the oldest backups and make new ones, but not so. My local Mac tech referred me to this page:



The pertinent section is "Forcing a Mac to inherit a backup." They tell you to enter this command in terminal:

sudo tmutil inheritbackup

I couldn't get it to work. My tech later reported back as follows:

Interestingly, I just did a test as Disk Utility in Sequoia can reformat a disk to be HFS+. When I then use that disk as a time machine destination, the disk gets reformatted as APFS. If there's existing data on it, and then I try to set up Time Machine, I only get the choice to erase the disk or use a different volume.

I wonder if something has changed and we won't be able to use the Time Machine inherit command. I admit it's been years since I've attempted it.

If the tech is right, I expect I'll have to format the Time Machine drive and start fresh. As I write this, I'm copying the "Andrew Buc's computer" folder to a spare external HDD I had lying around. If I ever have to restore an old file from that drive, I'll have to rummage through the drive with Finder, but it'll be better than nothing.

Any thoughts before I throw in the towel and format the Time Machine Drive? Thanks.