(And it’s also weird, because Apple still hasn’t made Time Machine work on APFS drives, but this shows it can create local Time Machine snapshots on an APFS volume.)Īpple continues to say that it only stores snapshots on drives with “plenty of free space,” and in the past that’s meant that it won’t store snapshots that will cause a drive to have less than 20 percent unused capacity left.
This seems like a step backwards, because not all portable Macs running High Sierra have flash startup volumes. Instead of storing snapshots on HFS+ volumes, Apple says that High Sierra only uses APFS-formatted, “all-flash” storage (i.e., not a Fusion Drive), whether it’s an internal or external flash drive. I wrote about this last in 2015, after readers were trying to troubleshoot otherwise inexplicable missing storage on their Macs.Īpple made a change to this in High Sierra. A Macworld reader has questions about managing these snapshots. It creates local snapshots on your startup volume and other connected HFS+ volumes, and then later transfers these to a Time Machine destination when you reconnect on a network. Time Machine has a nifty way of continuing to keep copies of versions of files as you change them even when it can’t connect to a Time Machine backup volume.
