macOS 11.5 will be available in a few days. Should you risk upgrading? Here are some of the major issues which you need to consider when deciding and planning any upgrade.
APFS
Most hard disks become increasingly likely to fail after 3 years. All Time Capsules are now in that zone, and should either be replaced or have their hard disks replaced.
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.
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 Eclectic Light Company 