Can i access a Catalina time machine backup from El Capitan ?

[moosed]

I am in the process of downgrading my mac from Catalina to El Capitan and wondering if i will have problems accessing data from my time machine backup which was created in Catalina.

I realise i obviously can't do a standard time machine restore when im running El Capitan (i wouldn't want to either) but can i browse my Catalina time machine disk like a normal hard drive and simply use finder to go through folders and find the files i want to copy over to my El Capitan drive ? Will there be an issue with regards to the Catalina backup being in APFS (El Catalina is in HFS+) ?

 

[chscag]

I know there is no difficulty going forward reading older Time Machine backups on a newer version of macOS, but going the other way..... I don't know.

Time Machine backups are made as HFS+ not APFS so that part of your concern should not be a problem.

What I would do is also create a cloned backup with either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to make sure you can extract what data you need when you devolve back to El Capitan.