How to format external drive for mac for time machine

#HOW TO FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC FOR TIME MACHINE SOFTWARE#
#HOW TO FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC FOR TIME MACHINE MAC#

And despite bumps along the way, it is undoubtedly only getting better as we move farther down this road.Do you need to reconfigure Time Machine to use a new external hard drive? If you read my Tech Tips regularly then youвЂ™llВ recall that I strongly recommend that everybody setup automatic and redundant systems to backup his or her Mac. But for us enthusiasts itвЂ™s interesting and fun (at times at least). One day, weвЂ™ll hopefully have figured out the best practices and have come up with the most efficient ways to deal with all this.ДЄnd likely, by then, Apple will have once again made aggressive changes in order to improve system security and we will have to start this relearning process once again.

#HOW TO FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC FOR TIME MACHINE MAC#

ThereвЂ™s still plenty of learning going on (even among experienced Mac enthusiasts, just see the many posts Howard has made on the topic and the lively discussions below those) and a lot of experiences made along the way that we can exchange. Similarly, the way macOS sets up its boot volume and separates user data from signed and sealed system data has changed radically how we need to think about things such as backups, cloning, emergency boots, and restoring. TM has gone through tremendous changes since Catalina.

And even if one existed, I donвЂ™t think IвЂ™d want to use it anyway.

#HOW TO FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC FOR TIME MACHINE SOFTWARE#

YouвЂ™d effectively be running the Time Machine backup logic hundreds (or thousands) of times.ДЄs far as I know, nobody has released a software package to do this. You will want to compare the files so you donвЂ™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 APFSвЂ™s deduplication capabilities.Д«ut 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 canвЂ™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:Д¤TB 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:

пЈїв†’ About This Mac в†’ System Report в†’ Hardware в†’ Storage reports: IвЂ™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).

How to format external drive for mac for time machine