Ventura Time Machine: Exclude Macintosh HD, delete old backups

peterpatter wrote:

Thanks Owl-53,

My Time Machine drive is over two years old. It's a LaCie 4TB HDD formatted as HFS+ and is becoming full.

It is a USB External Physical Volume • Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled).

As it fills up, TM automatically culls the older backups; however I would like TM to cull further up the line to create more space. Can this be arranged?

A - Not without the RISK of losing ALL the Time Machine Backups - Full Stop

Alternatively, can I delete the contents of the external HDD drive and reformat it as APFS? I would then have a 'new' HDD drive with APFS to start a fresh TM backup of all my files going on into the future. Would this be as efficient as purchasing a new HDD already pre-formatted for APFS? Is this a possibility?

Peterpatter

It is good practice to dedicate the Entire Physical Drive to the Sole purpose of Time Machine Backups

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

Understand, reformatting the Entire Physical Drive " LaCie 4TB HDD " will Remove Everything making near impossible to get anything back - Full Stop

Unfortunately, there is a creation individual who seems to have an personal agenda that maybe causing you to be swayed into certain directions

It is further suggested you weight the " Risk Factors " very carefully, especially as it comes to your Non Replaceable or Non Reproducible Important Personal Backed Up Data

Encrypted HFS+ (CoreStorage) is deprecated and will not be supported in macOS 28. If you use Encrypted HFS+ backups on external drives, begin backing up to encrypted APFS-formatted external drives instead. (175892336)

Might as well start moving over to APFS / GUID now rather than later

Mechanical Drives by there very nature and moving parts which of time to ware out

SSD Drives have No Moving Parts and tends to have longer useful life

HFS + formatted drives work better on Mechanical drives

APFS works better on SSD Drives

Thinking long term, decisions we make Now can be both beneficial or the converse of this have, detrimental

Aa where near the release of macOS 27 Golden State this fall.

Apple usually hold to supporting the 3 Most Recent Commercially Released version of macOS

Meaning once macOS 27 is released

Support to macOS 27, macOS 26 and macOS 15 will be supported for Updates and Security Updates

All older version will Not be

Weight the Pros and Cons that will suit your present and further need

Choose Wisely

🦉-53

Good on ye peterpatter

I prefer HFS certainly for hard drives and I gather the same as you have discovered. Also I can take an hfs formatted tm hard drive running sequoia and plug it into an iMac running Mojave and then read/ extract files. I can't do if backup is formatted apfs.

I know there are others who will tell you that the sky will fall in if you don't use apfs format.

That said on the latest Mac's there is a bit more to do to set the time-machine backup as HFS and if not done correctly, on the first TM backup it will format it as apfs even if you formatted as HFS. As a customer/user I'd rather have that choice.

In your case then I'd stick to apfs, which will be done without extra set procedures.

As to hard drives: you're right, if you are just using as a backup the speed of an SSD is irrelevant leave alone the cost.

Now the size. It is recommended that the drive is greater than 3 times the size of what you are initially backing up. If 2 times the size you may run out of space in 18 months(?) rather than 36 months (just numbers for illustration)

I prefer many small drives than one large. A drive will fail sometime whether large or smaller so many drives reduces the risk. For instance among the many and varied backups, I run 2 time-machine backups simultaneously alternating every hour, noting you intend to do once a day which can be arranged with two drives too.

Your 4TB disk is going to be mostly empty so it might not be cost effective either. If the premium is not too high, your choice, I'd go with 2 X 2 TB or whatever combination rather than a large (expensive) 4 TB dive. One backup is better than none of course.

So in conclusion although I like HFS format I think you should stick to what apple gives you by default - apfs

I recommend going with many smaller drives that one large one.

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Depending how risk averse you are and how important your data is I would recommend also an additional backup rather just TM. I have for many years used Carbon Copy Cloner and it is a wonderful programme, has been so useful. There's also SuperDuper which I gather is good too but as I have never used it I can't give the same accolades as CCC.