macOS Big Sur supports Time Machine on APFS-formatted drives, but there are a few catches<article>
<section class="page">
<p>Apple started shifting Macs from its old HFS+ filesystem to its more sophisticated APFS format with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. In that release, all SSD-based Macs were upgraded to APFS. Fusion Drives followed with macOS 10.14 Mojave. But it took a full three releases from the first APFS appearance until Time Machine backups could be written to drives formatted with APFS: macOS 11.0 Big Sur is the first release to allow that.</p><p>But you format a Time Machine drive to APFS, there are a few things to consider.</p><p><strong>There’s no way to convert an HFS+ Time Machine volume to one that uses APFS without erasing it.</strong> Apple created an <a href="
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/06/29/apfs-changes-in-big-sur-how-time-machine-backs-up-to-apfs-and-more/" rel="nofollow">exceedingly wacky way[/url] to encompass Time Machine’s snapshot format inside the APFS format, almost as if the company hadn’t developed both APFS and Time Machine. (Insert thinking face emoji here, for sure.)</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/3600278/macos-big-sur-supports-time-machine-on-apfs-formatted-drives-but-there-are-a-few-catches.html#jump">To read this article in full, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>
Source:
macOS Big Sur supports Time Machine on APFS-formatted drives, but there are a few catches
