One puzzling process which appears periodically is what’s shown as backup activity on the backup volume, when TMA isn’t making a backup. Time Machine still supports backups on Mac OS Extended format (Journaled), Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled), and Xsan formatted disks. February 2, 2019 at 5:54 PM. As I’ve spent much of the day sorting one such failure out, I thought it might be useful to discuss what went wrong and what went wronger. To distinguish between what are effectively two different systems, I’m going to refer to Time Machine backing up to APFS as TMA, and when backing up to HFS+ as TMH. The external hard drive didn't appear as an available drive. In High Sierra, they were ignored in favour of doing snapshot diffs, and later TMH was had a range of strategies to choose from. Goodbye NAS Time Machine backups. Doug Introduced in 2016, APFS is Apple's forward-thinking file system that it uses across practically its entire device ecosystem.With the introduction of macOS Big Sur, iOS 14, and iPadOS 14, Apple will be making it even more useful for users, by adding support for APFS in a few new areas. Catalina introduced a more complicated scheme to replace snapshots as the normal means for determining what to back up. Specifically, the new version of Time Machine makes use of APFS's snapshot technology. Without the directory hard link, backups would quickly be overwhelmed by hard links to files. Time Machine, whether TMA or TMH, isn’t designed to back up VMs, and you’re far better using other techniques, which are discussed in the comments to that article. Learn how your comment data is processed. APFS changes affect Time Machine in macOS Big Sur, encrypted drives in iOS 14 “Apple is increasing its support for APFS on its computing platforms, bringing the ability to use Time Machine with an APFS-formatted disk to macOS Big Sur, while enabling the ability to view external drives using encrypted APFS … I don’t know. Please re-read the discussion that I have referred to: neither TMH nor TMA are suitable for backing up VMs, and Apple makes that clear too. Howard. Is that correct? Time Machine is an excellent tool for backing up your Mac. One of those improvements is the ability to back up a Big Sur drive using Time Machine to an external APFS formatted drive. Your email address will not be published. In the meantime, I’ll look at how you might be able to use my Fintch/Dintch/cintch. APFS changes affect Time Machine in macOS Big Sur, encrypted drives in iOS 14 “Apple is increasing its support for APFS on its computing platforms, bringing the ability to use Time Machine with an APFS-formatted disk to macOS Big Sur, while enabling the ability to view external drives using encrypted APFS in iOS and iPadOS 14.” However, there are some very important caveats that … Explained why encrypting a Time Machine backup disk stopped it working – macOS had silently converted the disk to APFS. Alain says. As Oakley pointed out just after WWDC20, and as Ars Technica confirms in their Big Sur review, updating to Big Sur comes down to 2 Time Machine choices: 1) the legacy HFS+ hard link way and, 2) The APFS snapshot way. Sin embargo, luego del cambio en su sistema de archivos, de HFS a APFS, ha habido mucha confusión con la conversion de los respaldos. I know very few users who have accomplished it successfully, although quite a few have tried. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth a try. Another problem I can see is total lack of documentation regarding APFS backup volumes. Pick Your Samsung T7 in Disk Utility. A detailed assessment of the items to be backed up is then made, thus the total size to be backed up is forecast. The way it had been for years was much nicer in terms of interface to the end user. Best Format For Mac Time Machine Backup. They use the case-sensitive variant of APFS, which normally isn’t used in macOS but is the standard for iOS/iPadOS, volume ownership is enabled, and the volume is assigned the role of Backup. Question: Q: APFS Time Machine Compability Using a new Mac with Mac OS High Sierra and a new external Samsung T5 Drive, formated with Apples APFS Filesystem. The latter is essential, as without directory hard links, there’s no way of using the TMH method to make backups to an APFS volume. Is this read-only change a BigSur thing or a TMA thing? You can’t use volume where time machine snapshots live. Last night, I found myself in this endless ... Running "First Aid", and opening the disclosure triangle to get more information reveals that there are three Time Machine snapshots on my disk. It is not doable with how default TM works unless you do this manually which is not ideal for any backup. As we all know, during the keynote address of WWDC 2020 developer conference, apple did not introduce too many new features in the file application of IOS 14 and iPad OS 14, which may be due to little change. It’s also completely dependent on the backup volume using the HFS+ file system, to support those directory hard links. Open Disk Utility. This was presumably because computing a snapshot delta proved slow, and the introduction of the Volume Group, with specialist types of APFS volume for which snapshot deltas would be inappropriate or impossible. Much unlike previous TMH where all TM backups resided in a folder and next to it you could store other items on the root of that disk. For anyone who uses Time Machine, one of the major improvements in Big Sur is that it can now make its backups to APFS volumes. Source: Apple - Backup disks you can use with Time Machine (APFS isn't mentioned at all) Update: 24.12.2020. macOS Big Sur 11.0. Big Sur retains the option to continue using TMH to backups stored on HFS+ volumes, where it fixes one bug which for many made TMH unusable in Catalina: in Big Sur, TMH should no longer choke when trying to back up large hidden folders containing a volume’s version database, as those are now excluded from backups. Modifying this control will update this page automatically, Change the picture for you or others in apps, Make it easier to see what’s on the screen, Insert photos and documents from iPhone or iPad, Sync music, books, and more between devices, Manage cookies and other website data in Safari, Use Sign in with Apple for apps and websites. Apple has recently published a support article for system administrators regarding APFS and macOS High Sierra. Copyright © 2021 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. As with TMH, several strategies are available to determine which files need to be backed up from each volume. When your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or iMac is running MacOS Big Sur (version 11.0). There is no way to migrate from HFS+ Time Machine to APFS Time Machine … Important: You can back up from an HFS+ or APFS-formatted disk to an HFS+ disk; however, Time Machine can’t back up to an APFS-formatted disk. As Oakley pointed out just after WWDC20, and as Ars Technica confirms in their Big Sur review, updating to Big Sur comes down to 2 Time Machine choices: 1) the legacy HFS+ hard link way and, 2) The APFS snapshot way. Unlike in TMH, though, at present it doesn’t appear possible to delete any of the contents of an existing backup, only the whole of the backup stored in any given snapshot. The biggest disadvantage of all seems to be: APFS wasn’t compatible with Time Machine for a long time in the past. If you want to store files other than the Time Machine backup on the same physical device, use Disk Utility to create an additional APFS volume on the disk. It was just to know if the new Time Machine in APFS is capable of updating such virtual machine disk images saving only modified parts inside, instead of the full large disk image. Perhaps you can use Disk Utility. Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Many thanks for the interesting review. Discovered by experimenting that those APFS volumes need to actually be created with Disk Utility for Big Sur. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. It worked out what had changed and needed to be copied into the backup. If the disk is a Mac OS Extended format disk that contains an existing Time Machine backup, you aren’t asked to erase and reformat the disk. When Time Machine backs up to HFS+ (TMH), it both uses the features of that file system to its advantage with directory hard links, and suffers from its limitations. Personally I prefer to have a bit more granular control over TM behaviour. How I can migrate such backup to another disk (e.g. Local snapshots are only created on disks using the Apple File System … Time Machine does not currently support APFS (Apple File System) and Time Machine can’t back up to an APFS-formatted disk. Windows cannot natively read or write to HFS+ (journaled) volumes. If you accidentally delete or change a file, you can use Time Machine to recover it. Back up your Mac with Time Machine. Note that, unlike previous versions of Time Machine, in Big Sur neither TMH nor TMA can back up the System volume. Howard. TMA is very space efficient for VM images but you have to make sure that you only backup stable images (not running VM). APFS drives will not mount on macOS versions older than macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) APFS is only available when Scheme is set to ‘GUID Partition Map’, APFS will not be shown when Scheme is set to Master Boot Record – See Step 7; Starting with Big Sur, APFS is now the default for Time Machine; APFS does not natively work with Windows. Thank you. Documentation on anything is a problem – hence this series. However, its snapshot system is less flexible that the hard links of TMH. Time Machine doesn’t yet use APFS, but Apple could move Time Machine to APFS in a future release of macOS. On 10.14, it's very clear "Time Machine can’t back up to an APFS-formatted disk". Back up your Mac with Time Machine. Although Apple started using the new APFS file system by default a couple of years ago in Mac OS 10.14 Mojave, the Time Machine backup system has continued to use the old HFS+ file system. But if your external Time Machine drive runs out of space or starts to fail, you might need to transfer those backups elsewhere. Hi, I have just converted my Airport Time Capsule (2Tb) into APFS file system. If the disk uses the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition type, some partitions may not be available for use with Time Machine. The end result is, in almost every respect, superior to TMH, and Apple rightly recommends users to prefer it. Thank you for your quest to shed some light on inners working of macOS. Howard. If the disk doesn’t appear in the list of devices available for Time Machine backups, contact the disk’s manufacturer. Big Sur APFS-based Time Machine backups can’t be used in Catalina or earlier releases. The new Big Sur macOS has brought mostly positive changes to macOS. Time Machine volumes must be HFS+ formatted, listed in Disk Utility as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. RELATED: How to Encrypt Your Mac's System Drive, Removable Devices, and Individual Files APFS also supports multi-key encryption, which allows for different keys used to encrypt different … Press Esc to cancel. It is not a backup in the sense that it writes a lot of data to the internal disk as backup. But it is painfully limited when user has a bit more specific needs. These new part-volume snapshots don’t yet appear to be available to users. But in this transition, one capability was quietly lost: APFS volumes cannot be … Old backups are removed both according to age, and to maintain sufficient free space on the backup volume, in what TMA refers to as age-based and space-based thinning. In Big Sur, TMA’s snapshots aren’t whole-volume, only including the folders which are being backed up. Apple's termination of the AirPort/Time Capsule series, however, puts some users in a lurch over how they will be continuing to back up their Macs using Time Machine.Luckily there are Apple approved Time Machine backup options sans Time … If you had a million files and folders on the backup source volume, every hourly backup would have to create a total of a million copied files or hard links for those which remained unchanged. According to Apple, this enables "faster, more compact, and more reliable backups" than were possible … Howard. I ran SuperDuper first and found I had to re-format my external hard drive to the newer APFS. For anyone who uses Time Machine, one of the major improvements in Big Sur is that it can now make its backups to APFS volumes.