Well, heck.

I posted ~7 months ago about my decision to use HFS+ for backups, and had a couple skeptical replies. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317123)

I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.

It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.

Guess I'll figure out SuperDuper or Carbon Copy.

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hoherd 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This might be a blessing in disguise for you. The silent data rot of HFS+ is what pushed me to ZFS. I would never go back to HFS+.

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lakeviewterrace 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> encrypted Time Machine to a network location

this has a bonus feature where it will slowly corrupt itself over time and offer to start a completely new backup instead.

	▲	yangm97 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That would happen around once a year when I used the 2013 AirPort Time Capsule. It seemed to stop killing itself when I moved to a ZFS backed samba share. Funnily enough I also kept snapshots enabled because I was expecting TM to bork itself eventually, so I could always rollback to a working state but I don’t remember needing to use that.
	▲	thfuran an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sometimes it's pretty quick.

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AceJohnny2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.

One thing I have learned with (current) Apple is to never trust their commitment to support something they're not using. And even be wary for stuff they are using. (in my mind, a core technical difference between Microsoft & Apple is that MS will bend over backwards for backwards compatibility, whereas Apple will drop it as soon as they can, and sometimes sooner still)

They replaced their use of HFS+ with APFS in 2017, so it's had a good run.

	▲	AceJohnny2 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have heard from ex-CoreOS (the Apple org) colleagues is that the organization is run intentionally lean, because the leadership believes that people do their best work under pressure. This leads, among other things, to aggressive YAGNI pruning.
	▲	unsloppable 41 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Rosetta..

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mahboi 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wait, you can do encrypted backup to a network location but not to HFS+? What if the network location is just your own Mac?

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mrpippy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think APFS was designed or tuned with HDDs in mind, but it will work just fine. Especially for backups where random read/write performance is not important.

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MilaM 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would not recommend using an APFS formatted HDD for Time Machine. It's painfully slow. With my Samsung T7 the hourly Time Machine backups are usually finished after a couple of minutes. Using my older HDD they can easily take 20 minutes to half an hour.

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outofpaper 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While time machine used to be snappy on HDD it was build out of one of the weirdest little hacks hard links in folders. The new Time Machine might front a similar front end but under the hood its a different beast. You're having to mount snapshots as you move through time.

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fl0id 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

are you sure that is because of apfs? hdds are usually much slower, no?

	▲	zimpenfish 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's definitely APFS. I've had the pleasure* of HFS+ and APFS on the same external HDD and APFS is horrible. Given it is optimised for solid-state drives[0], it's understandable there'd be some slack but it is absolute horse paste. (If I could create an encrypted external HFS+ volume, I would but macOS hasn't allowed that for a while as far as my experience goes - it's non-encrypted HFS+ or encrypted APFS.) [0] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/seca6147599e/...

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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stingraycharles 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok I may be an idiot, but I just have a permanently attached external disk that does Time Machine, what am I missing out on? Why network location? Or are you backing up massive amounts of data? (for me it’s just 2TB)

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mahboi 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's mainly for multiple people in a household to back up to one location, especially if some have laptops that are often not on desks. Those Airport APs used to also let you attach disks for this. You could even do it over a VPN.

	▲	stingraycharles 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I so miss these Airport APs, I really don’t understand why the product line was cancelled, it was perfect.

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Marsymars 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh right — I could do a local HFS+ non-encrypted disk with encrypted Time Machine (I assume) — that just slipped my mind.

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root9876 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I switched to Borg on Linux server from local attached Time Machine disk after once I went to a long trip and forgot the disk at home.

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isityettime 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you use OpenZFS?

https://www.openzfsonosx.org/

	▲	Joel_Mckay an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		MacOS is only Posix like, and does a lot of weird nonstandard things in the background regarding mounting drives/images. There are restrictions on where things can run, what can run, and what is accessible to the process. SSHFS is slow, but at least can mount windows/linux/android systems over VPN without issues. Look at what is needed to bring up SSHFS or NTFS support, and you should have a better idea of Apples walled garden policies. Apple makes information appliances, and not general-purpose computers. Some may disagree, but they usually choose an exception use-case rather than the normal experience of users. =3 https://rclone.org/install/
	▲	barkingcat 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		heck no. not for backups.

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qmr 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

ZFS