APFS support for Time Machine on Mojave?

TL;DR: Has anybody tried testing whether Mojave's Time Machine application supports APFS volumes?


I was excited to check out APFS when High Sierra came out, and upgraded all my volumes (including my Time Machine volume) to APFS. It was only after that that I realized that Time Machine doesn't yet support APFS, as documented here and discussed previously in the beta forums for 10.13 (High Sierra).


I can personally work around it by using Disk Utility to add a partition with a legacy filesystem and shrinking my APFS volume to just big enough to keep my legacy data and Time Machine backups, but your average non-developer user would struggle with this, so just wondering if anybody has tried this yet. (I don't have a spare Mac that I feel comfortable installing Mojave beta on prior to the official release.)


Thanks in advance to anybody who comments.

Replies

To my understanding and from my experience, the partition on Time Machine is irrelevant. I have a MacBook Pro and a Western Digital NAS. The NAS has native support to be used as a Time Machine backup location, something I’ve been taking full advantage of since Yosemite. When I went from High Sierra to Mojave, I changed my MBP SSDs from HFS+ to APFS but I still backup to the same TM backup and have had no issues with backups and restores.

This doesn't actually address the question. Since Apple unveiled APFS, the format of a Time Machine volume does indeed matter; Time Machine can back up from an APFS volume but it cannot back up to an APFS volume. A Time Machine disk must be formatted MacOS Extended.

I've read about not using APFS as a Time Machine disk all over the internet as well, but this support doc states that it MUST be an APFS formatted disk - https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mchl31533145/10.14/mac/10.14 "The folder must be located on an Apple File System (APFS) volume and shared using the SMB protocol."


I'm confused by what I'm reading. My Mac Mini has a HFS+ formatted disk shared as a Time Machine disk for the other Macs on my network that have all been updated to Mojave and it's currently working.


If anyone knows more about this I'd like to know.


Sorry this doesn't answer your question.