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I was trading an article on back up drive formats and im slightly confused

I will post picture of apple article on backup drives and formats.


My question is should HDD drive time capsule format stay as HFS+

or should it be reformatted as APFS??

i read in another article DO NOT FORMAT TC with APFS it only runs on HFS+


Is that correct???


I am using 15” mid 2012 MBPro i7 2.6Ghz OS Catalina 10.15.7 it should APFS, had not checked im just assuming.

i bought 16” 2021 MBPro 32GB ram 2 TB storage, it will be set up to another TC.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on May 11, 2022 7:45 AM

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Posted on May 11, 2022 10:29 AM

My question is should HDD drive time capsule format stay as HFS+

or should it be reformatted as APFS??


It is not possible to format the HDD drive on a Time Capsule as APFS, so you have only one option for the drive on a Time Capsule, which HFS+.


Remember.......Apple discontinued the Time Capsule over 4 years ago, so it is not exactly up to date technology wise.


And....for what it's worth, you cannot use Disk Utility to format the drive on the Time Capsule. Instead, if you want to erase the hard drive on the Time Capsule, you must use the Erase function in AirPort Utility.


If your Mac is running the Big Sur or Monterey operating system, the hard drive has been formatted in APFS on the Mac. Time Machine will try to back up the data on the APFS formatted Mac on the Time Capsule, which can only be formatted as HFS+. Gosh, I wonder what could go wrong with this scheme. Personally, I would not trust this type of setup.


If your Mac is running Big Sur or Monterey, it would be much better if you could use Time Machine to back up a USB disk that has been formatted the same way as the Mac.......in APFS.

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Question marked as Best reply

May 11, 2022 10:29 AM in response to bikeman5

My question is should HDD drive time capsule format stay as HFS+

or should it be reformatted as APFS??


It is not possible to format the HDD drive on a Time Capsule as APFS, so you have only one option for the drive on a Time Capsule, which HFS+.


Remember.......Apple discontinued the Time Capsule over 4 years ago, so it is not exactly up to date technology wise.


And....for what it's worth, you cannot use Disk Utility to format the drive on the Time Capsule. Instead, if you want to erase the hard drive on the Time Capsule, you must use the Erase function in AirPort Utility.


If your Mac is running the Big Sur or Monterey operating system, the hard drive has been formatted in APFS on the Mac. Time Machine will try to back up the data on the APFS formatted Mac on the Time Capsule, which can only be formatted as HFS+. Gosh, I wonder what could go wrong with this scheme. Personally, I would not trust this type of setup.


If your Mac is running Big Sur or Monterey, it would be much better if you could use Time Machine to back up a USB disk that has been formatted the same way as the Mac.......in APFS.

May 11, 2022 11:13 AM in response to Bob Timmons

thanks again bob, talk about confusion, spell checked messed up my question, luckily enough substance was there for you to answer and confirm sort of what i was guessing. I read an article somewhere, i was reading that it said to make timecapsule run smoother reformat the drive to APFS and another site strictly spoke against it. im not trying to erase my timecapsule just trying to speed up the process. i got into that article reading articles to help with the process of time machine back ups using time capsule.

thanks BT

May 11, 2022 11:24 AM in response to bikeman5

I read an article somewhere, i was reading that it said to make timecapsule run smoother reformat the drive to APFS


Unfortunately, the information in the article was either wrong or misleading at best. The fact remains that it is not possible to format the hard drive inside a Time Capsule as APFS using either Disk Utility or AirPort Utility.


im not trying to erase my timecapsule just trying to speed up the process.


The only way that you might be able to "speed up" the backup process is connect your Mac directly to the Time Capsule using a wired Ethernet cable,,,,,,,,since the Ethernet connection is always going to be faster than a Wi-Fi connection.





I was trading an article on back up drive formats and im slightly confused

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