Quick-fire questions

Should I use HFS+ on an external hard disk?

> APFS is designed for SSDs, and can get slow on hard drives because of fragmentation of files and the file system itself. The common exception is backup storage for Time Machine: because its backups are added to rather than changed, APFS works well on hard disks that are only used to store backups.

How do I back up snapshots in Big Sur?

> Snapshots are copies of the information inside the file system of a volume, and are saved to its container. The user can’t copy them: the only software that does copy them is Time Machine, which uses them to make backups. Even cloning tools can’t copy snapshots when copying volumes.