Why hasn’t Apple fixed Time Machine so that it can back up to APFS yet?
Howard Oakley for Eclectic Light Company:
Speculation was rife among users, rather than developers, that last June’s WWDC might have brought announcement of a major update to Time Machine coming in Catalina. Now that all Macs running Mojave have to boot from APFS, and with Catalina’s additional conjuring trick of a read-only APFS system volume, for many systems now the only drives still using HFS+ are those for Time Machine’s backups. So why hasn’t Apple fixed Time Machine so that it can back up to APFS yet?
What we now have in Mojave is a sleeker and better Time Machine, but there’s still a long way to go before it will work well backing up to APFS volumes.
In Catalina, the engine needed seems largely complete, according to the presentations at WWDC, with Apple Software Restore (ASR) now able to use snapshot deltas and perform partial restores from backups. But the rest of the integration is still going to take time, and that’s inevitable because it involves changes in other parts of macOS.
MacDailyNews Take: It’ll take some time, but an APFS-capable Time Machine will arrive eventually – when most users are ready for it.
In my recent experience, APFS on hard disks was horrendously slow as fragmentation issues piled up. If the files are kept contiguous and they’re defragmented on the fly, I hope this issue is resolved.
What is taking so long to fix APFS so it fully supports Time Machine? It seems like they have been working on it forever.
I did a wipe/restore from TimeCapsule when I installed 10.13 Mojave, so I really getting a kick out of these replies.
The list of ‘hobbies’ continually grows at Apple.