![]() Many users have reported poor performance with SMB in Big Sur, but I don’t know whether that has been addressed in Monterey, or whether it even supports AFP any more. Although you may still be able to use this in Big Sur or even Monterey, it has been deprecated for years now, and Apple recommends that you should switch to SMB if at all possible. If you’re backing up over a network, you may have been using Apple’s old network file protocol AFP. It will be interesting to see how Time Machine evolves in the coming months. Public betas run a short copying performance test at the start of automatic backups, and appear to use that to better predict the time required to perform each backup. Check that the totalBytes transferred matches the size of the backup data on the disk, and the size expected from other entries in the reports provided.Īs far as I can see, Apple’s engineers have turned their attention to improving backup performance in Monterey. Speed fell noticeably towards the end when Time Machine was copying large numbers of files from Xcode, when it fell to just over 18 MB/s. In this case, the first 70% or so of the backup progressed very quickly, at nearly 140 MB/s and over 440 items/s. When it’s backing up, Time Machine writes periodic progress reports to the log, and T2M2 now includes a button to Check Speed which displays those, and allows you to identify items which are causing it to choke, so you can add those to your exclusion list. Although when backing up to APFS, Time Machine is better at coping with Virtual Machines, its hourly backups still aren’t a good way of backing up VMs, and they too should be excluded and backed up using a different system such as Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper! or ChronoSync. If you use either, it’s well worthwhile adding them to your exclusion list. However, Time Machine still doesn’t perform well when trying to back up folders containing huge numbers of small files, which can be created by some housekeeping utilities, and are found in Xcode. One reason for this is that the system exclusions list now includes the hidden version database at the root of each volume, which can contain a great many small files which choke the backup process in Catalina. Time Machine backing up to APFS generally performs extremely well, and far better than to HFS+ (particularly in Catalina). However, APFS does still perform better on SSDs, where possible. This is because the read-only snapshots used don’t result in much fragmentation, which is the underlying problem with more general use of APFS on rotating hard disks. So the only way to switch to APFS, whether you do it now or in the future, is to archive your existing HFS+ backups and start a new backup series on an APFS volume.Īlthough APFS has significant performance penalties when used for Data volumes and general-purpose storage on hard disks, it doesn’t work at all badly for backups to APFS. The problem when upgrading is that Time Machine can’t convert your old HFS+ backups to new-style APFS backups, as that would involve not just changing file system but completely rewriting every backup in the store. APFS backups are faster, and because they can copy changed blocks rather than having to copy whole files, they are more economical in terms of space too. APFS backups are stored in individual snapshots, each with their own file system, whereas HFS+ backups are all pooled together in a single file system which is inherently prone to error, a tendency which only grows the more backups are made to that volume. The new structure of the backup volume is far more reliable, and doesn’t need routine maintenance in the way that HFS+ does. There are many advantages with Time Machine backing up to APFS. ![]() ![]() I suspect that it will, but strongly recommend that anyone backing up to HFS+ and upgrading to Big Sur or Monterey should switch to Time Machine making backups to APFS. If you’re upgrading from Catalina or earlier, or are running Big Sur but still backing up to HFS+, it’s not yet clear whether Monterey will still be able to make backups to HFS+. As Time Machine backups no longer contain any of the System volume, the first backup after upgrading from Big Sur needn’t be much larger than normal either. Although it awaits confirmation in the final release of macOS 12, all the indications from beta-releases are that you won’t need to do anything: Time Machine should continue to back up happily to your existing backup storage, creating further snapshots which you can access as normal. The simplest migration is when you’re upgrading from Big Sur to Monterey, and are already backing up to APFS. One vital consideration is how to migrate our backups: this article looks at what you need to do for existing Time Machine backups, whether stored locally on an external disk, or on your network. It’s that time of year when many of us are planning our upgrades, either to Big Sur or Monterey. ![]()
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