Issue with Time Machine Backups and SSDs Formatted as APFS

[honestone]

I just saw this on www.maccentral.com:

https://www.macworld.com/article/32...our-time-machine-volume-from-hfs-to-apfs.html

Seems really strange that such an issue would exist. I mean it's a case of "Apple (OS 10.13 and APFS) can't work with Apple (Time Machine)". I use SuperDuper!, and on both of my external SSDs, each of the two backup partitions are formatted as APFS. I am not having any issues, although I only back up once a week.

 

[bladerunner714]

OUCH! This is the kind of gobbledygook that made Windows such a painful experience over time. As a relatively recent refugee from those wars (going on two years now) I had hoped find peace here in the Apple valley. I'm beginning to have a feel for why some folks stay with older versions of Mac OS. I think I'll sit tight with Sierra for a while longer to see what other ugly stuff might ooze out of the High Sierra mess. Is Apple losing its way?

And as always, thanks for the heads up, honestone.

 

[honestone]

You're welcome.

Yeah, this is not good news. It seems more and more issues are still occurring with High Sierra. V10.13.4 will be released soon, and I am not anticipating anything drastic will change. Fortunately, for me, except for a minor issue with Quicken 2007, and High Sierra being somewhat slower on startup, shutdown, and switching start-up devices/volumes, I am not having any issues at all. Of course, I am somewhat fortunate that I use only SSDs for both internal processing and external backups. However, I have not really seen any advantages with this APFS business.

I have never used Time Machine, as I wanted a more definitive (and easier) way to either perform an upgrade of the Mac OS to a new version, or for recovery. SuperDuper! (and Carbon Copy Cloner) definitely have Apple beat with both of those critical tasks. I will say, though, that it did take some time for Shirt Pocket Software (they make SuperDuper!) and Bombich Software (they make Carbon Copy Cloner) to arrive a version that worked well enough with High Sierra. I actually was pleasantly surprised that neither company charged for the upgrade. I would have had no qualms about paying for an upgrade to SuperDuper!. I actually found out about all their "struggles" while being on Micromat's forums (they make Tech Tool Pro, which is another critical application). Micromat needed to devote a lot of time and effort to arrive at a version of Tech Tool Pro that is fully compatible, and works flawlessly, with High Sierra. The APFS file system did present numerous challenges for Micromat, and they were finally able to overcome those. So far, neither Disk Warrior nor Drive Genius are completely compatible with High Sierra.

But I certainly understand why you would want to stay with Sierra. Definitely a stable OS, less prone to all this problematic stuff with High Sierra, and still well supported by Apple. In some ways, I wish I was back on Sierra, but given that I am not having issues with High Sierra, I am fine.