If somebody could explain this to me, I'd really appreciate it. I have no idea where I got a 16 TB disk from. And if I do have one, where is it? I've looked everywhere.
Mac Pro, macOS 12.7
It appears you or someone who set this up for you created a 16 TB disk image, a 'drive-inside a file' on your Mac. By default, that is stored on the Boot drive. Then told Time machine to use that "drive" as your backup drive.
Because a disk image file is like a "rubber bag", and grows in spurts as you stuff more data inside it, nominal size of 16TB is not YET an issue, but it will be VERY soon.
That is not a good setup, and wrong for many reasons, the most pressing of which is that you will soon run completely out of drive space.
You need to obtain a real physical External drive, and ADD that as an additional Time machine backup drive. Then every-other backup goes to every-other stand-alone drive until you remove the disk image 'drive'. Once the new drive has made one full backup on the external drive, you can feely remove the disk image as a backup destination, and the new one becomes the only backup drive.
If you have an advanced setup like another backup server on your network (another Mac configured as a backup server or a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device) perhaps Time machine was just given the wrong destination.
OK, here's a simple check...if Time Machine isn't running at all (not "preparing", actually backing up, "cleaning up" - not running at all) then your Time Machine disk shouldn't be connected over the network and shouldn't appear in diskutil output.
If you confim that Time Machine is not currently running (even toggle it off temporarily so it doesn't run), does this mystery 16.0TB disk still appear in the diskutil output?
"Time Machine wouldn't create an APFS container larger than the physical drive in a TC" that definitely threw me, having no 16 TB disk anywhere in my system.
Can somebody explain to me where my 16 TB backup disk is?!?!?
