Close to the top of my shortlist of new features in the next Apple Silicon Macs is that kernel panics become a thing of the past.
APFS
Content Caching server originated in 2005, as a feature in Mac OS X Server, which sold Xserves. Time Machine came in 2007, to support Time Capsules. Those legacies are so different, though.
macOS 12 Monterey promises consolidation and improvement, even truth and reconciliation perhaps. But Shortcuts and Universal Control promise strongly.
Track down all those duplicated files, and you could save yourself loads of disk space. Rather, you used to be able to. Why this doesn’t work so well now.
With a new version of Xcode, I knew that my network backup would take several hours. Then, as it neared its conclusion, disaster struck: the router reset itself and the network share vanished.
How Café and Café are actually different, and only one of those can be a filename in macOS, despite APFS being a non-normalising file system.
Slow performance when backing up to a network share is mainly down to SMB. Without its improvement, Time Machine over a network is still dead in the water.
Provided it doesn’t have to back up large folders containing many small files, Time Machine backing up to APFS on a network share works well.
The first full backup is performed as a manual backup, and largely occurs in file-by-file copying from source to the backup store. It is more efficient than to HFS+, but differences could be less than 10%.
A summary of the known benefits and current limitations of Time Machine backups to APFS, with links to more detailed accounts.
The Eclectic Light Company 