libertymatters

elijahg said:

libertymatters said:

CheeseFreeze said:

Why aren't they retiring this antique approach to back-ups? I mean, they now have a filesystem that supports snapshots, but Time Machine still uses the legacy pre-APFS approach and has been proven to be incredibly inefficient compared to third-party solutions.

I know Apple is focusing on services so they actually rather want us to back-up on their cloud VS locally, so why aren't they just EOL'ing this thing altogether, and instead support third-party developers in providing a back-up solution?

And who in their right mind is still "travelling back in time" by traversing through Finder or app time instances (the latter only working with a few 1st-part apps) in 2021? I mean, the Steve Jobs-era visualisation of using Z-depth for time is novel, but hardly practical.

Time Machine can use APFS disks for backup as of Big Sur.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-can-use-with-time-machine-mh15139/mac

@CheeseFreeze isn't talking about APFS backup destinations, but using a filesystem feature of APFS rather than the ancient HFS+ hard links (and their equivalent in APFS) that Time Machine uses now. New Time Machine backups stored on networked disks do now use APFS disk images rather than HFS+.

athempel said:

CheeseFreeze said:

Why aren't they retiring this antique approach to back-ups? I mean, they now have a filesystem that supports snapshots

How would an APFS snapshot on the same physical disk save your data from the failure of said disk?

It wouldn't. However, snapshots don't technically have to be stored on the source drive. Whether APFS supports this right now, I'm not sure.

@CheeseFreeze is completely right with his comment. TM is archaic and inefficient. A snapshot stores only the block-level difference between files, whereas Time Machine copies the entire file across again even if there's one single bit changed. For a 1kb file that doesn't matter, but nowadays with file sizes ballooning, 1GB+ files are pretty common. Change the title of that file and the entire thing gets copied across again, without the other file being deleted on the backup. So wasting 2x space for one identical file.

Also TM is sluggish on networked disks and the UI is pretty awful. I'd much rather pick a file, see a list of previous versions of that file with previews, and maybe a diff, all integrated properly into the Finder. Not the outdated full-screen TM UI that we have now.