APFS containers and volumes for backup drive

TidBITS Talk
1

I am using a new MacBook Pro that came with Catalina preinstalled, so I am making some adjustments in my workflow.

Previously I have used SuperDuper to back up to external HDDs, each divided into two 500-GB partitions. One of the partitions is for a clone of my internal drive and the other is for archived data that I don’t keep on my internal drive.

Now with APFS, I have erased the external drives and on each of them created a container with two volumes.

Is that better than two containers on each drive?

Thank you,

David

2

I have an internal drive with 4 volumes (with different versions of MacOS) in a single container. Also an external drive with 2 containers with just one volume in each. I haven’t noticed any difference. A single container should be more flexible regarding the use of the total space on the drive.

3

Thanks for the info.

Was there any special reason you used one method or the other?

4

It was mostly accidental. Both drives were hfs+, one with one partition and other with 2, and I converted everything to apfs replacing partitions with containers, knowing I could put as many volumes in them as necessary.