A lot of what Time Machine does when making backups to an APFS volume remains a mystery. So far we don’t understand the magic used by Apple.
clone
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.
For some, inability to clone to the internal SSD of an M1 Mac seems disastrous. In reality, it could achieve little, and there are better solutions.
Cloning has been a popular way of creating external bootable disks. Now that CCC 6 can make full clones of disks for M1 Macs, is it a solution?
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%.
Sparse bundles, sparse files, and sparse matrices explained in a nutshell, and how a sparse bundle could have a band which is a sparse file containing a sparse matrix.
Adds support for reporting whether a file is a sparse file, or has been cloned, in Big Sur.
New version searches for sparse files and clones, reporting their individual sizes and totals for the folder or volume examined.
Can APFS really store more on disk using sparse files and clones? Is there such a thing as a free lunch, or do these tricks have a cost?
APFS can ‘clone’ files when copying or duplicating them within the same volume. But how can you tell whether any given file is a clone?
