Are you prepared for the removal of support for AFP in a ‘future version of macOS’? Here’s what you need to know, and what you should consider doing.
SMB
How Spotlight works, Core and global Spotlight, importing failure, exclusions from indexing, re-indexing, excessive re-indexing, failure to find, iCloud Drive and network shares.
Consider the fidelity of backup copies, the speed of a backup method, and the risk of losing the contents of that backup. And test backups by restoring samples from them.
Although your Mac may be unable to boot into macOS, it might be able to start up in Recovery, or offer its internal SSD in Target Disk Mode.
How to plan and assemble faster backup systems for Time Machine, whether to change I/O policy, and how to minimise their size using exclusions.
Backing up with Time Machine to a NAS or other network storage is different. Here’s an account of how it creates and handles sparse bundle storage in Ventura 13.2.
All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups.
Since Catalina, reports of Time Machine backups slowing to a crawl have become common, but the reasons are unclear. It’s time for Apple to inform us.
Have you got problems backing up to your NAS? Here is a series of four simple tests to perform to give clear insights and help you tune its performance.
Backing up using Time Machine over Gigabit Ethernet to another Mac providing shared backup storage in Monterey 12.1 delivered good performance of 35-43 MB/s.
The Eclectic Light Company 