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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

    sudo tmutil snapshot

Is this what time machine automatically does every hour? Or is it a different feature? Is this the local one or the one on a remote disk?

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I'm gonna answer these myself. Apparently sudo tmutil snapshot is the local snapshot, not the remote backup and it has existed as a verb since way before APFS existed. So now I guess the question is: did the implementation of local snapshots change with APFS?

Yes. They talked about APFS and the new local Time Machine implementation at WWDC.

You can view the dates of your local snapshots dates with:

    tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates /

I have one from last week, two from yesterday, and two from today.

Yes, I'm pretty sure it did. I seem to remember one of the APFS sessions at WWDC (either 2016 or 2017) had a demo about how local TM snapshots used to work (really kind of a hack), and how APFS would improve the situation dramatically.

Does anyone happen to know if the new Time Machine backups are automagically better (upgraded), or should I start over with a fresh backup destination?

The new implementation only applies to local time machine backups. Backups to external drives have not changed.

Is there a way to move this backup to any other storage mechanism, say Dropbox?

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