High Sierra - Convert Time Machine to APFS?

[crjackson2134]

Just installed High Sierra, noticing nothing remarkable on the surface so far. Should I convert my Samsung 840PRO SSD (not the boot drive) to APFS or not? It's currently being used as a TM backup drive.

Boot drive (Apple SSD) was converted automatically during the install...

 

[Nermal]

I personally wouldn't want to use a comparatively-untested filesystem for my backup drive. It's probably best to keep it on HFS until APFS has been "stress tested" by the masses.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I see no reason to convert. Keep it as HFS+ and you shouldn't have any problems (all things equal) rolling back to Sierra if needed.

 

[crjackson2134]

Yeah, was kind of leaning that way... Thanks for the input guys.

 

[LarryJoe33]

Keep it HFS, this way it is universally compatible with all OSx's. You are just using it to dump TM snapshots, it's a proven file system, you don't need the advantages of APFS on that purposed drive.

 

[h9826790]

Unless you do lots of file duplication etc on the 840 Pro. Otherwise, I don't think you can benefit much from APFS, but just taking risk of having trouble.

Anyway, as you said, "nothing remarkable", then why fix something (HFS+ in this case) which didn't break?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Just installed High Sierra, noticing nothing remarkable on the surface so far. Should I convert my Samsung 840PRO SSD (not the boot drive) to APFS or not? It's currently being used as a TM backup drive.

Time Machine drives have to be HFS+ at this point.

If you format a drive as APFS and then try to set it as a TM volume it will tell you it has to HFS+
[doublepost=1506405444][/doublepost]Another point about converting other non-boot volumes to APFS, if they are encrypted, they will not be seen on a Sierra computer. Thus may not matter to you.

Carbon Copy Cloner v5 can back up to an APFS backup drive, and there is every advantage in doing this because it also backs up the Recovery, Reboot and VM partitions all in the same run. No more separate creating the Recovery. So I have converted my clones to APFS. (actually erased them APFS and made new backup, rather than converting existing).