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.
Time Machine
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.
For many users, it’s essential to be able to check the integrity of the data which are in a backup. This feature has changed when backing up to APFS.
How to repair a snapshot with an error when it’s one of your backups on a hard disk? Currently this seems impossible, putting all those backups at risk.
When your backups are stored on hard disks, even though they may use APFS, it’s important to check they’re sound. How to do better than Disk Utility.
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.
Tackles decisions and problems, including whether to use APFS in the backup sparsebundle, AFP or SMB, and configuration.
Can you migrate your old backups from HFS+ to APFS format? What can slow your backups down? Can you still use AFP, and what about restoring the system?
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