Without re-reading all of the above posts, have you found the following (posted on MacInTouch) to be the case:
"Mike Bombich, whose company makes Carbon Copy Cloner has stated in this podcast… that external backup drives in Catalina can no longer be HFS+ but must become APFS."
And does it really matter, or in what cases would it matter?
As far as I can discern it all depends on the definition of a
"backup drive". Time Machine
only works on drives formatted HFS+ and that is true in Mojave as well as Catalina.
I have an experimental version of Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner that has not been thoroughly vetted with Catalina but appears to work satisfactorily. The Note that accompanies it reads
- The current build of CCC will not make a proper backup of a macOS Catalina startup disk. Don't attempt to back up the startup disk, and ignore any suggestions to reformat the destination as HFS+.
- Your Catalina startup disk will not appear in CCC's sidebar.
- If you would like to make a backup of your user data on a Catalina volume (not that you should be using it in production!), you may drag the /System/Volumes/Data folder onto CCC's Source selector to specify the Data volume as the source for a backup task.
- Stay tuned for another beta release that will address most of the "backing up the Catalina startup disk" issues.
- No, we don't have a timeline. The changes in Catalina that affect backup processes are more significant than any previous macOS release. CCC can make a bootable backup of Catalina (we had a proof of concept just days after Apple's announcement), and we will be ready for Catalina before it is released in the Fall. We will post another beta when we have addressed the bulk of the known issues. It's a long list, we appreciate your patience!
Mike Bombich has never been a fan of APFS so I tend to take his comments in light of that.
