Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Removing Unwanted APFS Time Machine Backups

Rich Trouton:

With APFS-formatted Time Machine backup drives, only the option to restore files is available. The Delete Backup or Delete All Backups options are not available.

[…]

You can remove unwanted backups using either the Finder, or by using the tmutil command line tool.

I like browsing and restoring from APFS Time Machine backups, and they seem much better in theory, but I’m tempted to go back to HFS+ because with APFS (at least on Monterey) Spotlight never stops indexing, and there’s no way to turn it off. Alas, Disk Utility doesn’t even make encrypted HFS+ volumes anymore.

Previously:

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"Alas, Disk Utility doesn’t even make encrypted HFS+ volumes anymore."

Wait, what?

APFS is notorious for poor performance on spinning drives, so what are you supposed to do to make an encrypted external TM drive?

I am pretty sure you can still create encrypted HFS+ volumes with the `hdiutil create` command, though.

hdiutil creates disk images. I think you can do it with diskutil, though.

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