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My penchant for beta releases tends to keep me ahead of the technological power curve but there can be a cost for computing on the bleeding edge, my case in point is SoftRAID on an M1 Mac mini. I have relied on a SoftRAID RAID 5 array Time Machine drive for a few years now because of its added reliability and safety, not to mention it is quite fast in spite of the relatively lethargic 5400 rpm disk drives it uses. It worked well until Apple threw a curve ball in maOS 11 (Big Sur) by not allowing third party kernel extensions (drivers) in the System area. It wasn't until macOS 11.3 beta three or four and SoftRAID 6.0.1 b53 that OWC and Apple came to a full meeting of the minds and my RAID array actually started taking to my M1 Mac mini. (Although Finder and Time Machine could access the array using the SoftRAID 6.0.1 b53 driver, the SoftRAID application could not see the array as mounted or change the array configuration as it was supposed to.)

Things settled down and MacOS 11.3 beta 7 and the full release of SoftAID 6.0.1 (almost immediately updated to 6.0.2 then 24 hours later 6.0.3) were released pretty close to the same time. I installed SoftRAID 6.0.3, and it was working so well that I decided to go forward with a long planned project and replace the drives in my array thereby doubling its capacity. That was when the fun began. The SoftRAID 5.0.3 app had no problem verifying the new drives or setting up the new array, but it can only configure the array as HFS+, HFS+ Case Sensitive, and MS-DOS. Afterward both Finder and the SoftRAID app could "mount" the array, but when I attempted to use it as the Time Machine drive, TM would reliably go into a hard hang.

It was at this point I discovered that beginning with MacOS 11 the Time Machine drive can no longer be formatted anything but APFS because Time Machine backups are in the form of APFS Snapshots. (The use of snapshots dramatically reduces the size of the backup data set and makes the entire TM process much faster, using far fewer CPU cycles.) The workaround I eventually arrived at was to re-install the SoftRAID 6.0.1 b563 app alongside the release version of SoftRAID 6.0.3 and keeping the SoftRAID 6.0.3 drivers and because the b53 version can configure the array as APFS using it to setup my "new" larger array.

Time Machine is happily backing up to the array today and I can access it in Finder, but neither version of SoftRAID can mount or manipulate it. 🤦🏻‍♂️ But it is working and I am a reasonably happy camper. There is one small remaining detail however. Because of a problem in Apple's API used for kernel extensions mounted in the user area Time Machine is unable to encrypt the backup and keeps complaining about backing an encrypted drive to an unencrypted Time Machine drive. But then macOS 11.3 is still in beta so 🤷‍♂️

This may have been answered previously elsewhere, but when a user moves to MacOS 11 with an HFS+ Time Machine drive, does the drive get reformatted automatically without losing the old backups, or does it require an APFS reformatting with old data loss?