time machine backup mac no time machine backups were found

Also, when moving from a much older Mac or MacOS to a new one, consider utilizing two Time Machine backup drives (Time Machine alternates between them) on the old system, retaining one with the full old backup history as an archive, and erasing and starting anew with one backup drive for the new Mac/system. I'm not defending the way Time Machine is set up, but what I describe above is simply what I have observed from years of using Time Machine and migrating to new machines (or drives) with it.īottom line is that a larger Time Machine is recommended, 2x the size of the source drive is too small, 4x or larger is much better. The backup drive was just not large enough. Hence you probably ran out of room soon after continuing to use the original backup drive for the new M1 Mac (while keeping what it had from the older Mac). This might seem inefficient but it happens that way so that Time Machine is able to faithfully reproduce (restore) what was on your M1 Mac, in addition to what was backed up from the old Mac. Hence the first backup on a new Mac, or under a new MacOS, if updating the existing backup drive, can be quite large. Even if the content of the files did not change. Depending on how old the previous Mac was and how far back the previous MacOS was, the files and their arrangement on the new Mac can be quite different from that on the old Mac.

Because of incremental backups over time, the backup drive probably was more than 50% full at the time you switched to a new M1 Mac. In your case it was about twice the size. It is recommended that the Time Machine backup drive be 4x the size of the source drive being backed up.

Time machine backup mac no time machine backups were found