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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.

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Andrew Buc wrote:

On 29 Jan 2025, at 20:48, Jim Saklad via groups.io wrote:

Andrew Buc wrote:

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:

It looks to me like you are making Time Machine backups OF your computer’s internal drive TO your computer’s internal drive.

No, I’ve been making Time Machine backups to an external drive all along. That didn’t change when I switched from the old Mac to the new Mac.

On 29 Jan 2025, at 20:48, Jim Saklad via groups.io wrote:

Andrew Buc wrote:

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:

It looks to me like you are making Time Machine backups OF your computer’s internal drive TO your computer’s internal drive.

The screen shot shows only my Time Machine drive, not the internal SSD.