Time Machine and APFS

[itsa...@icloud.com]

Hello all,

Big Sur allows Time Machine to backup to an APFS formatted drive. Apart from just being a modern and robust filing system, it’s much faster to perform TM backups than HFS+ according to what I’ve seen. I planned to reformat my WD Passport drive using Disk Utility for speed and reliability improvements.

The problem is that the format fails because fseventsd is using the drive. I could kill it in Activity Monitor I suppose but I don’t know if that’s wise …

Any thoughts, or should I just carry on using HFS+?

I’ve downloaded the latest WD Utility app which has an erase option but it still only offers HFS+J.

Cheers,

Stephen



"My nephew asked me what a Conservative is, so I stole half his toys and gave them to the rich family next door." ~ unknown

[A C Crooks]

I’ve got a WD drive I’m using for Time Machine. I had to halt TM before doing an erase and reformat. TM uses fseventsd so that might be what you see. Anyway with TM not running Disk Utility happily reformatted the WD drive as APFS.

I can confirm that with APFS TM runs much faster than with HFS+

Regards,

Tony
Sent from my iPad

> On 16 Nov 2020, at 22:33, itsagroup via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to smug+uns...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/78DDD71F-A986-48DA-A34A-44341EDF9E12%40icloud.com.

[itsa...@icloud.com]

Thanks for the info Tony. I don’t have TM set to run automatically as I have it run by an external app (TM Editor) - I found the hourly frequency too much when using Xcode. I’m not sure why TM would be running, but I must say that I didn’t check after I’d connected the drive.

As you’ve managed it though, there’s hope! I’ll try again.

Regards,

Stephen

An economist believes that a group of the 5 smartest humans on earth, when locked in an empty vault, will find a way to make a sandwich if the demand for one is great enough. - Unknown

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/9C2AA36B-09B6-4C53-81FD-F7B9F9CA231E%40me.com.