Carbonite and APFS

July 31, 2018 12:04 AM

I've been holding up on upgrading to macOS High Sierra, but it's probably past time for me to make the jump. However, I'm currently in the middle of an initial Carbonite upload (some several hundred GB to go). Once I upgrade and get my filesystem converted to APFS, will Carbonite have to re-upload everything?

If so, I'll stop the upload and do the upgrade first. If not, I'd like to just finish the upload before beginning another tech "project." Thanks in advance.

posted by dondiego87 to Technology (4 answers total)

I've never used the Carbonite consumer product and they're really cagey with information about how it works, but they advertise deduplication in the commercial products. As long as deduplication is supported in the consumer product (and there's some good reasons why it would be, so not having it would be extremely surprising), at worst it'll rescan the files and determine that they have been uploaded already. It might take a little while to do this for each file but it won't be close to a full upload. Therefore, there's no reason not to let it finish the current backup if that's what you want to do.
posted by doomsey at 6:14 AM on July 31, 2018

Best answer: If Carbonite works like Backblaze does, no. The APFS update shouldn't change any of the files. As doomsey says, the Carbonite software might rescan your files to see if anything's changed, but the data should all be the same and it'll skip over anything that hasn't been altered since the last backup.

That said, when you're doing an OS upgrade, it's best to have a full backup handy in case something goes wrong. Let your Carbonite backup finish, and if possible, make a local clone of your boot drive, too.
posted by SansPoint at 6:55 AM on July 31, 2018

A while since I used it, but file system will not be the issue; file name, drive & disk name is an issue. Just call or chat at them.
posted by theora55 at 9:09 AM on July 31, 2018

Response by poster: Okay, thanks y'all. I'm gonna let it finish, but this is gonna be the greatest backup of all time. (And yes, I will have a bootable local copy before the OS upgrade!)
posted by dondiego87 at 2:07 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]