Time Machine drives - APFS & Mac OS Extended

Last week was on a call with Apple Senior Tech who said do not use APFS with Time Machine.

I have also found APFS to be highly unstable and slow to connect. If you mistype password (which Big Sur and Previous OS never remember), the screen grays out and may lock up. Only cure is to restart snd or hard shut down.

Also, have LaCie 2Big RAID 0. Formatted to APFS Encrypted. Three weeks later, drive 1 stopped working. Under Disk Utility, the drive name changed to APFS…

Why Apple stopped MacOS Extended Encryption is very unfortunate for us. They need to correct this. APFS cannot be read by older OS. Forces us to keep laptop with previous OS version.

Then you should probably not take any other advice from the “Apple Senior Tech” as there is no way to create a new Time Machine backup in Big Sur.

All of the downsides of using APFS with a spinning hard drive would not affect a Time Machine backup drive.

My external APFS encryption passwords are remembered.

So, presumably, I can format the Time Machine drive as OSX extended And when the Time Machine software looks at it it will recognised it’s already formatted so won’t try and re-format it?

No, it will look at it and not find a backup started previous to Big Sur and format the drive APFS.

Big Sur will continue an HFS+ backup if it was started before Big Sur. Any new backup disks will be APFS (and case sensitive).

Any encryption applied in Big Sur should convert the drive to APFS.

I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner but here is some Big Sur Time Machine info:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-the-ars-technica-review/9/#h1

You can format the drive however you want, but Time Machine Will format it however it wants.