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- FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR IMAC IN MAC OS SIERRA UPGRADE
- FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR IMAC IN MAC OS SIERRA PRO
FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR IMAC IN MAC OS SIERRA PRO
Separate JHFS+ partition for 2018 MacBook Pro (and the new laptop if it’s a Mac) backups once it’s on macOS Catalina or macOS Big Sur. 2018 MacBook Pro should also back up to this partition before upgrading to Catalina or Big Sur. JHFS+ partition for the 2011 iMac and any drives connected to it. Given your situation, I would create two partitions on the drive: I haven’t tested it out yet myself, but apparently each APFS backup volume is specific to each Mac - you’d need at least two volumes (which automatically resize) in the APFS container if you were to format the 12 TB drive as APFS, considering that you’re getting a new laptop (presumably a Mac). In macOS Big Sur (currently beta), Apple finally added support for APFS-formatted backup volumes (still supports JHFS+ AFAIK).
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It’s possible for two or more Macs to share the same backup volume AFAIK, since the backup store on the root level is divided into machine directories.
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If you’re not planning to share the drive over the network (and instead manually connect the drive to each Mac), Time Machine in macOS Catalina or earlier demands that the backup drive be formatted as JHFS+. If you’re sharing the drive over the network, Time Machine in macOS Catalina and earlier doesn’t care what the filesystem format is a JHFS+ sparsebundle disk image (which isn’t as flexible as APFS) will be created for each machine, and all of the backups for that machine will be stored inside there.
FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR IMAC IN MAC OS SIERRA UPGRADE
I should note that in the next 6 months I'm likely going to upgrade the 2018 MBP to Catalina and purchase a new laptop, so potentially this setup might have to change with how Catalina reformats system volumes? Unless I'm over thinking it. Has anyone else done anything similar? Any real world downsides I might run into? I'm aware APFS on a spinning disk hard drive has performance issues, but this 12TB drive is basically never going to be used live and is exclusively for backing up media. Rather than deal with micromanaging resizing partitions, I was considering splitting the 12TB drive into 4 volumes so the free space is shared between them. I'm currently backing up using Carbon Copy Cloner. I normally format my backup drives as HFS+ and partition so I can have bootable clones should any of the household computers fail. A 2011 iMac: Currently running High Sierra I'm about to purchase a 12TB external drive to backup: