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macOS 11: All the little things!

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Did you see the image I posted? I have the bluetooth icon in my menu bar, what I don't have are the dots through it indicating that something is connected via bluetooth. This is what it used to look like when my headphones were connected in Catalina and earlier:
Screen Shot 2020-11-14 at 6.07.45 PM.png


In Big Sur, you have to click on the icon to see if something is connected. It's a small change but very inconvenient if you regularly switch your headphones between different devices.

Given that iOS 14 shows connection status and even gives a rough battery life indication, I was hoping Big Sur would adopt that standard rather than make the existing icon less useful.
 
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KoolAid-Drink said:
Oh, cool. Thanks! I thought it was related with the new Big Sur APFS updates with Time Machine, didn't realize it was also there in Catalina. :)
Click to expand...
Showing my ignorance here... What is a consistency scan, and does Big Sur automatically convert Time Machine to APFS. If not, should one do that manually and start over with TM?

FWIW, I did a nuke and pave at least once a month with Catalina's release until about the first of September. The dog from hell! But so far I'm have no major issues with Big Sur, and the minor ones are very minor.
 
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JUMA55 said:
What is a consistency scan, and does Big Sur automatically convert Time Machine to APFS. If not, should one do that manually and start over with TM?
Click to expand...
TM uses a file called fsevents to track file changes and uses that to know what to backup. If for some reason you think fsevents is corrupted, you can run a consistency scan and TM will go through and manually compare every file to the backup to see what needs to be updated. It can take a long time.

As @Diskutant mentioned, you need to reformat TM for APFS. I reformatted to APFS encrypted and it is a lot faster than the old HFS+ setup.
 
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Diskutant said:
According to arstechnica there is no way to convert the backup to apfs.
And you should start over because it’s faster with apfs.

arstechnica.com

macOS 11.0 Big Sur: The Ars Technica review

Yes, you read that right—Mac OS X (or macOS 10?) is no more.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
Click to expand...
Thank you. I reformatted my TM drive as APFS and started over. You are correct: it's much faster than before.
Weaselboy said:
TM uses a file called fsevents to track file changes and uses that to know what to backup. If for some reason you think fsevents is corrupted, you can run a consistency scan and TM will go through and manually compare every file to the backup to see what needs to be updated. It can take a long time.

As @Diskutant mentioned, you need to reformat TM for APFS. I reformatted to APFS encrypted and it is a lot faster than the old HFS+ setup.
Click to expand...
I did reformat and start over. Tons faster. I did my last build of Catalina back in August, and I believe it took about a working day to back up 900GB or so of data to a fresh drive. This morning it took less than 90 minutes. Thanks, guys!
 
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I am digging dragging display from Control Center in status bar to the status bar, to quick adjust True Tone and dark mode and slide bar brightness
 
JUMA55 said:
Thank you. I reformatted my TM drive as APFS and started over. You are correct: it's much faster than before.

I did reformat and start over. Tons faster. I did my last build of Catalina back in August, and I believe it took about a working day to back up 900GB or so of data to a fresh drive. This morning it took less than 90 minutes. Thanks, guys!
Click to expand...
It should be noted that Big Sur forces backups without backing up the system partition. This was an optional checkbox in Catalina, and probably represents a big part of why backups are faster.
 
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ErikGrim said:
Pretty sure you are thinking of the sound icon my friend, bluetooth menu was always just the logo:

View attachment 1668647
Click to expand...
I'm 100% certain I'm not. In previous versions, the bluetooth icon would change to look like this when headphones were connected:

Screen Shot 2020-11-14 at 6.07.45 PM.png

In Big Sur, there's no glanceable indicator that my headphones are connected, or at least not that I've found so far. I'd love to be wrong though, so if you can direct me to whatever setting I need to toggle I'd greatly appreciate it.



EDIT:
Just to be clear on what I'm talking about, I've made this to hopefully better illustrate what I mean:

Screen Shot 2020-11-15 at 8.41.57 PM.png
 
Last edited:
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JUMA55 said:
Thank you. I reformatted my TM drive as APFS and started over. You are correct: it's much faster than before.

I did reformat and start over. Tons faster. I did my last build of Catalina back in August, and I believe it took about a working day to back up 900GB or so of data to a fresh drive. This morning it took less than 90 minutes. Thanks, guys!
Click to expand...
Question: For your APFS drives do you use spinning HDs or SSD? Thought SSDs were a waste for TM or APFS?
 
boss.king said:
I'm 100% certain I'm not. In previous versions, the bluetooth icon would change to look like this when headphones were connected:

View attachment 1668689

In Big Sur, there's no glanceable indicator that my headphones are connected, or at least not that I've found so far. I'd love to be wrong though, so if you can direct me to whatever setting I need to toggle I'd greatly appreciate it.



EDIT:
Just to be clear on what I'm talking about, I've made this to hopefully better illustrate what I mean:

View attachment 1668704
Click to expand...
I have literally never seen the device connected version (and I obviously have things connected all the time) :eek:
 
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RabidMacFan said:
It should be noted that Big Sur forces backups without backing up the system partition. This was an optional checkbox in Catalina, and probably represents a big part of why backups are faster.
Click to expand...

It does look like TM is only backing up the data volume and not the system volume. So I'm assuming one would not be able to do a full OS restore from a TM backup like previously.

Screen Shot 2020-11-16 at 6.27.26 AM.png
 
If I get it right, you can’t change anything on the system volume anyway. At least not without a lot of tinkering. So, there seems to be no need to back it up.
 
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