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Time Machine won't stop asking to inherit a backup

There was a similar thread based on this (almost same subject line) but it was in 2015 and so I think things have changed - and now the solution there doesn't apply. I have two computers, a mini and a MacBook Pro. The mini is connected directly to my external drive and the MBP backs up via the network to it.


My mini asks every single time it does a backup if I want to inherit the MBP's backup or create a new one. I always have to say create a new one, but it doesn't actually create a new one it just finds its old backup in the backups.backupdb folder. I know this is still keeping the two separate because when entering Time Machine on either computer they still have unique differences. The MBP is my first computer and when I got the mini I used the migration assistant to copy over all my files. I'm wondering if this has something to do with it.


I noticed that the MBP has it's own .sparsebundle but the mini doesn't - not sure if maybe that is causing the problem or how that happened.


I JUST started using Time Machine again and had wiped the external drive of all backups previously (I kept on some wedding videos etc). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Feb 18, 2020 9:20 PM

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Question marked as Apple recommended

Best justification is it doesn't work now.


Its touch and go that TM carries over from Mojave to Catalina without reformatting the TM disk with just one Mac.

I like to Keep things simple and you need more than one backup anyway.

Posted on Feb 19, 2020 7:43 AM

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Time Machine won't stop asking to inherit a backup

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