time machine – Can’t inherit / associatedisk TimeMachine backups (APFS) from a reformatted external drive

I had to reformat an external raid drive (called Joshua) after expanding its size. After reformatting it, I restored it from our TM drive (called Moses). However once everything is copied over and I go to back it up, TM wants to call the new drive Joshua 1, and of course take up the full space of the drive.

I should mention at this point, that we are on a 2023 MacMini M2 Pro, with Sonoma 14.5. This seems to be significant because the recent versions of MacOS format a TM drive as APFS by default. For some reason, inheritbackup and associatedisk do not work with APFS, or if they do, it is not well documented.

Inheriting Time Machine Backup: Invalid Target mentions a way to resolve moving time machine from one Mac to another. This case is somewhat different in that I am “merely” trying to get TM to recognize the “Old” Joshua backup as being the same as the “New” Joshua’s data.

As this other post suggests trying, I got the extended metadata from the respective folders so that hopefully I can write new metadata. For some reason, though if I put xattr -l /volumes/Joshua into terminal, it does not give me any metadata. Not sure if I am doing it wrong, or if Joshua simply doesn’t have any metadata.

I put the UUID metadata from the TM backups into a spreadsheet (I have two backups that I pulled data from; and a third backup that I am keeping offline for safety reasons.) I can’t seem to bring the screenshot in, but com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID are identical for the old Joshua between Moses and OffsiteBackup. I thought I found what I needed; however, the com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID for the new Joshua are different for Moses and OffsiteBackup.

My ultimate goal is to get Moses (and the other offsite backups) to associate the “new” Joshua with the backup data for the “old” Joshua.

1. I have not been able to get inheritbackup or associatedisk to work; and my research indicates that this is due to the TM drives using APFS. Is this correct?

2. Is com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID the “magical” metadata that I need to change to get Moses to recognize the “new” Joshua in place of the “old”? Or is there something else? And how do I get xattr to show me what the metadata for the new /Volumes/Joshua?

TM will be busy restoring data for most of the weekend, but I’ll be monitoring this post over the weekend. Thank you for any help you can give.