I'm not sure I got this from the article but what exactly is the advantage of using APFS over HFS+ for Time Machine? The only advantage that was highlighted was per file encryption which seems to be an exclusive to the Apple Silicon Macs. And perhaps the logical volume management that allows you to use an external drive as both a backup disk and a general purpose disk?
I think that because APFS uses snapshots to monitor how files change over time, and APFS uses a block-level copy-on-write mechanism for files that change, time machine may be able to create smaller diffs when backing up over APFS because it only needs to store modified blocks, not entire modified files.
Yes definitely. The internals of APFS offer lots of things like these that would be very benefitial for backups.
So using APFS on the backup volume should increase backup speeds big time.
That sounds great! I have a workflow that uses a network mounted HFS+ image for Time Machine backups that are then backed up to my GDrive. Anything to reduce the incremental backup size would help this.
> And perhaps the logical volume management that allows you to use an external drive as both a backup disk and a general purpose disk?
You can already can do this without any logical volume management. Time Machine backups on a disk go into the /Backups.backupdb directory. You can create other subdirectories of the root directory and put other files there (or put files directly into the volume root), and Time Machine will just ignore them completely.
