A Fix for Time Machine Always Making Full Backups

Introduction At some point, I upgraded the macOS version on my iMac from Sequoia to Tahoe . I think this was the trigger that starting making Time Machine always perform full backups to my Mac Mini server. (Normally, it’s supposed to perform incremental backups.) Not only was this a lot slower, but it filled up my back-up disk and caused “disk full” errors. I Google’d, I asked LLMs, tried several things — nothing fixed it. I had to disable Time Machine backups until I found a solution. The Fix I eventually stumbled across this answer . I’ve distilled the fix into a script: ! /usr/bin/env bash set -e # stop on error ATTRIBUTES =( com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress com.apple.backupd.ComputerName com.apple.backupd.HostUUID com.apple.backupd.ModelID com.apple.timemachine.private.structure.metadata ) DIR = /System/Volumes/Data for attr in " ${ ATTRIBUTES [@] } " do xattr -d $attr $DIR done At this point, I figured I might as well try it. So I: Removed the remote disk as a backup destina