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 [-]

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