How to prevent Time Machine from formatting drive to APFS. MacOS Monterey.

Question

How to prevent Time Machine from formatting drive to APFS. MacOS Monterey.

My Asus wireless router will not mount APFS.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Nov 22, 2024 7:04 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 22, 2024 7:19 AM in response to George T. Mule

ERASE the drive, again, and deliberately choose the desired format needed, rather than taking the defaults. exFAT probably provides support for the largest files without getting into proprietary formats like NTFS.

Once connected to your Router (PROVIDED it supports Mac backups) your Mac will create a sparse bundle disk image (a Volume inside a file) on the remote device, and a Mac file system is created inside, holding your backups in the the sparse bundle-disk image.

To the remote device, the sparse bundle disk image is just a file, that occasionally grows in size.

To the Mac, that is a remote shared backup destination.

'Remote' in this case means not directly locally attached (i.e., not a local USB drive any more).

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Answer 2

Nov 22, 2024 9:44 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Mmmm, this was working under Mojave.

After the upgrade to Monterey, Time Machine would not use the same setup to do backups. Wouldn’t even see the existing backup.

Connected the drive (Crucial 2TB external SSD) directly to the MBP, and it insisted on re-formatting to APFS (from the macOS extended) erasing the existing backup, and running a new one.

Good enough, but now the router won’t mount the APFS-formatted drive.

I will try to re-format, connect it to the router and run Time Machine again, but I don’t expect it to work.

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Answer 3

Nov 22, 2024 11:40 AM in response to George T. Mule

<< [time machine]...Wouldn’t even see the existing backup. >>

remote backups are not using the same format as local backups, so a backup made locally cannot be re-used as a remote backup.

if you made certain to Mount the pre-existing remote backup drive so that it could easily be found, Time machine should have offered the option to "inherit" the old backup.

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Going forward, you are not going to use this in the expected, ordinary way. That will require you to manually format (actually bundled into ERASE command) the drive first, in a format that the Router can use, then connect it to the Router and verify that the Router sees the formatted drive, then tell time machine to place its backups there (when it is ALREADY "remotely" connected.

When you tell time machine to use a local drive, it will re-format in the format it prefers, reducing your options.

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Answer 4

Nov 22, 2024 1:15 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

>Going forward, you are not going to use this in the expected, ordinary way. That will require you to manually format (actually bundled into ERASE command) the drive first, in a format that the Router can use, then connect it to the Router and verify that the Router sees the formatted drive, then tell time machine to place its backups there (when it is ALREADY "remotely" connected.

Nope; that didn't work, either.

Reformat it while plugged into the laptop as MacOS Extended, plug it into the router, and the router handles mounting it and making it available on the local network just fine. I have read/write access to it from the MBP, but Time Machine won't use it; doesn't appear to even "see" it.

Format it again, thru the router firmware, as HFS+ (same as MacOS Extended AFAIK); same thing; Time Machine won't use it.

Plug the drive back into the laptop, and Time Machine won't do a thing until it has reformatted the drive to APFS; then it gets right to business. Plug it back into the router, and it "sees" the drive, but won't mount it.

I was hoping someone could fill in the missing piece here, but maybe there simply isn't one?

Guess I'll just do occasional "manual" backups until I figure out a different solution. As I mentioned, Time Machine backup of the same MBP, to the same drive, plugged into the same router worked fine under Mojave. No apparent path to success with _this_ project on Monterey. So it goes.

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Answer 5

Nov 22, 2024 3:27 PM in response to George T. Mule

The main Apple information is about using another Mac as the shared destination. When you use a Mac as the shared destination, MaxOS on the destination automatically includes a few more steps to help the shared backup destination get recognized and stay recognized. So out of ignorance of third-party device setup, I have "left out" some important steps that if you were using a MacOS destination, MacOS does for you. But it turns out CAN be done manually, and some users have documented the process:

Step 1. Connect and mount the (Windows shared folder or) Samba (SMB) share

Step 2. Create an empty sparsebundle image (on the remote share)

Step 3. Make the remote share automatically mounted

Step 4. Configure Time Machine to Use the Remote Share and Image File

There are some third-party articles around that detail the additional steps you need to take when the destination is NOT a Mac. This one seems to be from a linux user.

https://manjaro.site/how-to-configure-time-machine-to-backup-to-samba-shared-folder/

(lots of junky ads, but the information is there)

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Answer 6

Nov 22, 2024 5:27 PM in response to George T. Mule

So here is The Rest of the Story:

I saw a warning come up on the router app regarding security on Samba; guest user enabled. Turned it off.

Then, sometime later, I had to do a forced shutdown when the machine failed to awaken from a nap.

The remote drive is now working for Time Machine. HFS+ file system.

Best guess? Time Machine needed a restart to accept the new configuration? Could be the security flag, could be a combination, I suppose, but once it gets its bits together, it _does_ write to the remote macos/hfs partition.

TIA, all! Bye.

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