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Is there any value to formatting a rotation HD as APFS for time machine
- Thread starter ssls6
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After reading the OP's post, I was ready to reply that I didn't think there was any advantage for APFS over Core Storage for Time Machine on a rotator. But I received a little bit of a shock when I went to look at my disks in Disk Utility....
I completely reformatted my 2TB drive (WD Red) into 2 partitions. 1TB for Big Sur to use for TM, and 1TB for other stuff. I had initially formatted it as Core Storage (HFS+)on both partitions, but after I selected the drive in TM preferences, the OS seems to have converted it to APFS (Case Sensitive) on its own.
I am not having any issues with it. It backs up normally and without fail. There was just never any indication that the filesystem was changed.
So any advantage? I'll still say no, but somehow the OS preferred it here. Odd.
My local backup is a 8TB rotational partitioned as 1,1,6. 1 TB is a Mojave clone that I'm not touching. 1TB is a BS clone that was converted to APFS upon the first cloning. The 6TB is an existing time machine backup that BS left alone and it is still HPFS.
Here is what happened to container 5
I could erase Backup and start again with APFS but at this point I don't see any value. I know HPFS uses hard links to files and hard links don't exist in APFS which could be good.
I guess I don't care about speed here just stability over time.
Here is what happened to container 5
I could erase Backup and start again with APFS but at this point I don't see any value. I know HPFS uses hard links to files and hard links don't exist in APFS which could be good.
I guess I don't care about speed here just stability over time.
Yes. Basically when you use APFS it will utilize native APFS snapshots, instead of the previous hard-link based system. The backup transfers are quicker/smaller because of this. The TM in Big Sur always uses APFS for this reason. If you have an HFS+ HD, it will save the backups into an APFS sparsefile.
That's not entirely true. If you have an existing backup chain on an HFS+ drive Time Machine will simply continue using it without touching the underlying filesystem.
I was wondering about the benefits of APFS over HFS+ for Time Machine backups too. Currently, I am still using an HFS+ formatted drive with backups going as far back as early early 2019 (aka almost two years). However, making new backups takes forever as I don't have the drive connected 24/7 but only every now and then to take a new backup, and every time it takes between 2-4 hours to save may 20-30 GB of data. If APFS was faster I might consider getting a new backup drive and start a fresh backup chain while leaving the old one untouch for at least a year just in case. Does anyone have some real-world experience with how much faster APFS Time Machine actually is?
APFS on platter drivers, while supposed to have some defragmentation mechanism, causes issues with fragmented extents that increase seek time.
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Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To
After 16 months of using and testing APFS—Apple's new file system—I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters).
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