best way to format external hard drive time machine

TM has gone through tremendous changes since Catalina. And even if one existed, I don’t think I’d want to use it anyway. You’d effectively be running the Time Machine backup logic hundreds (or thousands) of times.Īs far as I know, nobody has released a software package to do this. You will want to compare the files so you don’t overwrite unchanged files, and you will want to only copy those disk blocks that differ when there are changes, in order to take advantage of APFS’s deduplication capabilities.īut this would take an extremely long time to run. Copy the next backup from the TMH volume to the TMA volume.Create a new snapshot on the TMA volume.Copy the oldest backup from the TMH volume to the TMA volume.I suppose it would theoretically be possible to copy-convert a TM volume. Due to the fact that Time Machine on HFS+ (TMH) is structured completely different from Time Machine on APFS (TMA), you can’t just convert a volume from one to the other. Secondly, you make me wonder: is it possible to move/import my existing, multi-year HFS+ TM history to a new (empty) APFS TM drive? (Sounds too good to be true, but I have to ask.)

Would you recommend any utility to clean off old cruft from prior operating system versions? Is a Monterey Time Machine backup more robust on a drive formatted as APFS (vs. Would my Time Machine backup be more robust if the external drive were formatted as APFS? As I understand, APFS supports snapshots (like ZFS) so I was thinking that Monterey TM would make use of snapshots for its backups instead of hard links like TM used in the past. One External USB3 Drive used for Time Machine continuously for over five years:ĤTB Spinning Rust formatted as Journaled HFS+ 6TB SATA Spinning Rust formatted as Journaled HFS+ (3.6TB Free).121GB SSD formatted as APFS (64GB free).Two Internal Drives used for macOS, applications, and data: → About This Mac → System Report → Hardware → Storage reports: I’m running macOS Monterey (12.1) on an ancient iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015, iMac17,1 shipped with 10.11 El Capitan and all newer OS installs have been updates, NOT clean installs).

Best way to format external hard drive time machine