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After installing Big Sur, I would like to format my Time Capsule disk with APFS to use with time machine.
In airport utility, there is not choice of disk format
and
if I access it via the finder with SMB - Disk utility report it as a Disk Image Media
I am not sure what to do next ?
ok, I tried like you said. From Airport Utility, I erased the disk.
Now if I mount the sparsebunble as an external disk, a get info on it does report an APFS file format
but I cant seems to find a way to check the format of the Disk on the time capsule.
I connect to it via 2 method
finder -> time capsule - double click on the disk -> get info
finder -> CMD-K -> smb://local ip -> get info
and I see this
but I cant seems to find a way to check the format of the Disk on the time capsule.
The disk format in the TC has not changed it was and is and forever more will be HFS+. This is not controlled by the computer but from the TC firmware. The backupbundle or sparsebundle works as a virtual disk. It can be formatted anyway Apple wants to.. which is why you are showing AppleShare via AFP and FAT via SMB (unfortunately the TC only uses SMB1 and is effectively windows NT server to outside world) FAT is of course not correct.
If you wish to access the TC firmware you will need to turn on SSH.
See the info here.
It is about changing country. But the first part gives info about turning on SSH.
You can then use terminal and type in nbdiagnose
That will give you screeds of info from a script Apple buried into the Gen5 TC.. not earlier versions.
And in that you will find info about the hard drive.
There are also standard hard disk command from BSD.
As far as speed is concerned the TC is very limited by processor performance.. it cannot exceed about 40MB/s and using Time Machine is much slower than that.
Sorry I don't have anything upgradable to Big Sur to test for you.
If I open the backup in Finder and use disk utility it shows the format is HFS+
You cannot change the format of the TC disk.. It is now and forevermore HFS+ as it is built into the firmware of the TC.
Apple could in the future change the sparse bundle design to include APFS but it is not actually ready for Networks yet.. AFAIK.
IF......you completely erase the Time Capsule disk and start over again with a new backup of a Mac running Big Sur.......some users have reported that Time Machine will automatically format the Time Capsule disk in APFS and then perform the first backup.
No guarantees on this......I'm going on reports that I've picked up over various support forums.
If you decide to try this, please report on your results.
Frankly, as unreliable as Time Machine has been with backups to a Time Capsule using Catalina, I don't see much upside in trying to continue to use a Time Capsule for backups, but it's your call.
My friend has a external drive for time machine. He erased it to format it with APFS
after the erase he timed the first backup at 1 hrs 37 minutes for 175 GB
my first backup after the erase took , the prepare was very long , then when it started it report 6 hrs left, and an hour later report 2 hours left, then I went to sleep, so I dont know :-)
you mentioned time machine on time capsule as been unreliable.
I did had to erase the back Twice because of error, but since then it was ok.
I had 3 computer doing backup on it and I think after all those year, the drive inside the time capsule need to be changed.
I might try to put another external drive (APFS) on my mini and see if the backup is faster there.
Looking at other posts.. Apple might be doing a hidden whole disk sparsebundle and then adding other backups into that main whole disk.. details are still murky.
What I am sure about is the underlying format has not changed.. and it cannot change without a major overhaul of the TC firmware because APFS has never been included.
Big Sur - Time capsule - format APFS
