I'm upgrading from an old iMac to my first Apple Silicon Mac and want to get the lowdown on how Time Machine works with the latest OS. Specifically, if I plan to use a single USB drive for multiple Macs, do I need to set up a separate DMG container for each one? Will Time Machine create these automatically if I back up over a network share? Also, is it better to format the destination drive as APFS? I have some older Macs that don't use APFS; will their DMG format be HFS+ instead? What about the file system on the HDD itself? I had some good guides on Time Machine, but they're pretty outdated, and it feels like I should start fresh rather than trying to restore and inherit my existing backups.
1 Answer
You can absolutely back up multiple Macs to one APFS volume without needing to pre-create DMGs for each. Time Machine will handle generating separate sparsebundles for each Mac automatically. If you're using a shared drive, just ensure that it's accessible all the time for backups. One thing to remember is that unlike earlier versions of macOS, backups now exclude system files, so you won't be able to roll back updates like you could before. Just keep an eye on your drive space since it will manage itself by deleting older backups as needed.
Yeah, I’ve been using that method for my backups as well. I was wondering if it’d be worth it to also do local backups on my iMac since it’s stationary. I’ve been thinking about getting an extra drive for off-site backups that I would just swap between my computers every few months.