What is the lingering danger of Time Machine and APFS?

[eicca]

I still haven't upgraded to 10.13 because I've heard something happens to Time Machine drives.

My Time Machine drive is a 500GB HDD, old-fashioned platter style. Is it that APFS doesn't work on HDDs and 10.13 Time Machine can only read from APFS, or what's up? What am I missing?

 

[aliensporebomb]

I heard similar things but my Mac is running a fusion drive. I wasn't sure it was switching those to APFS at all due to the problems of dealing with drives that are different types like that.

 

[techwarrior]

TM drives cannot be APFS, even if they are external SSD. There are numerous posts about issues with TM running on APFS formatted drives. Currently, only internal SSD are supported for APFS.

When you upgrade, if your internal boot drive is SSD, it will convert. All other drives, including external drives, internal HDD and Fusion will all be left alone.

APFS can be used to format external drives using Disk Utility, but there really is little to be gained by doing this.

I suspect that eventually, all drives will be supported with APFS.

 

[eicca]

Guess I’ll back it up, and if the upgrade goes south, downgrade back to Sierra before trying to restore from Time Machine.

 

[eicca]

Well it upgraded without a hitch. Seems to be running a bit smoother too.