I want to understand item 10) on the list of features for 6.9.3-T211.
It is said Time Machine and SMB support.
What I understand SMB support for Time Machine is badly needed and I actually thought already in place. The reason I thought so is tath for the macOS uppgrade to HIgh Sierrar that came in the fall, Time Machine can ONLY be done over SMB. And from Netgear I have hear that people have not much complain about using HIgh Sierra and to Time Machine backup to a NAS running say 6.9.1 or say 6.9.2 or even earlier. So what does "SMB support for Time Machine" really mean?
There's an Apple support page that has been misinterpreted and SMB support is not as urgent as you might think. The APFS filesystem (filesystem used in Macs with just SSDs installed) can only be shared over SMB, but we don't use APFS. So you can't backup over AFP to a drive formatted using APFS. In fact, I think Time Machine backups can't be done to an APFS filesystem at all at this stage.
Even though Time Machine backups can still be done over AFP at this stage one would expect after an annual major release or two that option will be taken away. Eventually Apple will likely consider AFP support is no longer needed for backwards compatibility with older Macs that can't run recent versions of Mac OS X.
In 6.9.3 we've added the ability to do Time Machine backups over SMB. We'd certainly appreciate your feedback if you'd like to test it.
Thank you for a very much for the answer! It clarifies a lot.
I also understand that Time Machine cannot backup to the new file system APFS and we likely see a substantially re-designed backup software from Apple later on. Good to know that backup will continue using AFP even for High Sierra using Time Machine and to the NAS or something else.
In principle I would like to contribute with testing a bit, but it has to wait until March, due to high workload here. If that is still interesting let me know. Is there some test protocol you like me to look at and I can see if I am able to do it?
