Don’t clutter your backups with files you’d never want to restore. Here are five methods to exclude items from Time Machine backups to keep them leaner.
Time Machine
A great advance in APFS which enables Big Sur’s Sealed System Volume, and backups being made to APFS. Here they’re fully explained.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
The Eclectic Light Company 