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.
Time Capsule
From dispatch of a new automatic backup, through computing which items need to be backed up, cleaning up snapshots and old backups, to success at the end.
Released in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on 26 October 2007, it supported Time Capsules launched in January 2008, and in Big Sur could back up to APFS.
The most frequent error written to the log during my backups concerns a rogue RTFD that went recursive on me 4 years ago, and has come back to haunt me.
First released 16 years ago, it was destined for Time Capsules, and relied on hard links in HFS+. It soon used APFS snapshots, and now uses them as the basis for its backups.
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.
Is a NAS system worth considering for your backups? Could one replace your existing Time Capsule? Here’s additional information to help you decide.
A full Time Machine backup over SMB analysed in detail. This reveals that some of the measures reported in the log are likely to be inaccurate and misleading, and gives suggestions for improving performance.
Complete slides analysing the history of Time Machine from first release to backing up to APFS in Big Sur, with detailed diagrams.
Links to my presentation, and to a selection of useful articles about Time Machine backups to APFS, and more.
The Eclectic Light Company 