How to enable time machine on mac how to#
How to enable time machine on mac pro#
How to enable time machine on mac mac#

So I wrote one, Spundle, to save me having to keep using the command line. No disk image utility that I know of – Disk Utility or C-Command’s excellent DropDMG – gives me a simple way to create a journalled HFS+ sparse image of maximum size 650 GB and maximum band size 350 MB. For a sparse bundle of maximum capacity 650 GB, that required setting the maximum band size to around 350 MB. To improve performance and ensure that my backup sparse bundle wouldn’t suffer any such problems, I wanted to keep the number of bands down to less than 2,000.

As the default maximum size of a band is 8.4 MB, a single sparse bundle containing 500 GB would require almost 60,000 bands. Experience with shared storage is that, if the number of bands exceeds about 100,000, then the sparse bundle is likely to malfunction. Sparse bundles store their data in many files, termed bands, in the same folder. But before I could do that, there were several hurdles to overcome. The core of my plan was therefore to get Time Machine to back up to an HFS+ sparse bundle on an APFS volume. One way of hosting a different file system is to use a disk image, in this case a sparse bundle, which has from the first release of Time Machine been used to store backups on shared and networked storage. It would be far more convenient for the whole of that SSD to be in APFS, but because Time Machine backups still rely on directory hard links, which aren’t available in APFS, HFS+ it must remain. But with SSDs the situation is different: for instance, one of my Time Machine backup disks is a 2 TB SSD, on which those backups occupy less than 200 GB. Indeed, because of the poor performance of APFS on hard disks, I’m sure that you’d much prefer to. If you’re still backing up to hard disk, then there’s no problem with continuing to use HFS+.

How to enable time machine on mac how to#

In this article I explain how to avoid that, and keep your Time Machine backups on disks formatted using APFS instead. It’s then a pain having to keep two of those in HFS+ format to cater for Time Machine backups.

How to enable time machine on mac mac#

Once the folder is mounted, open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences and add the folder as your backup destination.Like many Mac users, I’ve now phased out the use of hard disks, and although I still have plenty around, all my everyday storage is on SSD.

How to enable time machine on mac pro#

In the above example, now is when you would move to your MacBook Pro and connect to that shared folder across the network.Ĥ. If not, Time Machine will fill up the entire drive with time.ģ. If you wish to cap the size that the backups can take, you can do so here as well:

In the new window, enable the drive for use as a Time Machine Backup Destination. Then, right-click on it and select Advanced Option… Hit the small + button below the Shared Folders list and add your new drive or folder. Once the drive is ready, navigate to the Sharing pane in System Preferences. Then, I created a folder on the root level of the hard drive named “MBP Backups,” just to keep things neat on the drive.Ģ. APFS may be the default for Time Machine drives at some point, but today is not that day. The drive I am using came formatted for Windows, so I took a quick trip to Disk Utility to format it in HFS+, naming it “Backup Drive”. You can hook up an USB hard drive to that Mac mini, and within a few minutes, be backing your MacBook Pro up across your network using Time Machine. Say you have a Mac mini on your network, and a MacBook Pro. Anyone running High Sierra or later on a Mac can now turn that Mac into a destination for remote machines to use for Time Machine. It used to be that to run a Time Machine Server, you needed to be running a copy of macOS Server on your host machine, but those days are now gone.