Volume resizing for SuperDuper! with APFS

[ashleykaryl]

I recently experienced a hard drive failure on an old external drive that was being using for SuperDuper backups, so I acquired a new 2TB drive that I planned to use for Time Machine, so that will remain as HFS+.

That still leaves another 2TB external drive that can be used to backup the boot drive with SuperDuper, however that seems like far too much space, given that my SSD boot drive is only 256Gigs, with about 150 gigs free at the moment. I originally figured I'd keep 250 gigs for that purpose and leave the rest for some other storage.

I went to partition this as APFS to make use of the new changes in SuperDuper, but disk utility is talking about adding volumes to the container, rather than creating fixed partitions like in the past and I'm not sure how best to proceed. Any suggestions?

On a side note, now that SuperDuper is making use of snapshots, doesn't that effectively make it a more efficient alternative to Time Machine, now we can choose the point we want to use for backup with APFS, rather than just the latest state?

[dnanian]

The space in the container is shared, so the size can grow and shrink as needed. You can, of course, set a quota or minimum.

As I indicated in the blog post about the new snapshot capabilities, we can't control the number of snapshots that are retained, nor their overall lifespan. So, no: continue to use Time Machine as well.

It's important, in my opinion, to use both different backup destinations (separate drives, online, etc) as well as different programs (e.g. us, Time Machine, Backblaze, etc). That way, you protect yourself against hardware issues, corruption, and even mistakes that one application might make. After all everything has bugs - but by having some redundancy in application, you can help to protect yourself against that too.

I certainly practice what I preach here, and use all three across a lot of media.

[ashleykaryl]

I use BackBlaze as well. I guess my confusion/concern relates to smart updates, because I don't want SuperDuper potentially wiping unrelated information on the same physical hard drive, even if they are apparently separate volumes. If SuperDuper can manage this intelligently then flexible volumes that can grow as required seem like a much more flexible option than hard partitions.

[dnanian]

Smart Update is only interacting with the volume. Not other volumes. It is better than hard partitions - I discuss that in the blog, too.

[ashleykaryl]

It's a brave new world, but it sounds like an exciting one with some useful improvements!