It’s fast, consumes less space, which means more room for backups, has greater resistance to data corruption, and copies cloned or sparse files efficiently. Time Machine backups to APFS are impressive when compared to HFS+.However, you won’t be asked for this option for the already formatted HFS+ disk. Apple lets you format an external drive and choose APFS for Time Machine on macOS Big Sur.An external SSD gives you the best performance over APFS, provided you don’t need to use the drive with other pre-Sierra Macs.

If speed and convenience are your top priorities and cost is not an issue.You can also manage free space on the drives efficiently copy-on-write metadata scheme to improve performance, thereby reducing chances of data corruption and increasing focus on encryption. It makes common operations such as copying files and folders instantaneous. The current Apple File System documentation highlights many improvements over HFS+. As of macOS Mojave, fusion drives and HDDs were also upgraded to APFS. In High Sierra, SSD boot drives were converted to APFS upon installation. The experimental support of APFS was first seen in macOS Sierra. Apple File System (APFS)ĪPFS is Apple’s modern file system, first launched in early 2017 for iOS devices. Let’s take a detailed look at each of them, what they’re used for, and which you should pick for your external drive. Disk Utility allows you to choose from a variety of file system formats.

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