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.
backup
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.
If you last backed up an iOS/iPadOS device to iCloud over 6 months ago, or backed up to a WD My Book Live, those backups have probably vanished. How to safeguard them.
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.
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.
How can it take over 5 hours to back up 79 GB of files to a network share? That’s an average transfer rate of 4 MB/s, probably slower than your Internet connection.
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%.
Should now be fully compatible with all locales, calendars, and with both 12- and 24-hour clocks.
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 