Anyone having difficulties with time machine on encrypted drives?

[ArkSingularity]

Hello all,

I've been using Time Machine on an external MyPassport 5TB drive for a little while now, and it's recently started taking an unusually long time to mount. Sometimes it will take upwards of 10 minutes to detect the disk. Trying to mount manually through disk utility does not work either, I usually just have to keep the drive connected and wait it out.

Eventually the drive mounts and the backup begins. Speeds seem normal once the volume is actually detected, but for some reason, MacOS seems to be having quite a hard time getting encrypted time machine volumes mounted quickly.

Not really the end of the world, perhaps this is just an anecdotal fluke on my end. Figured I'd ask and see if anyone else had experienced this (I have no problems with just reformatting the drive, but I wouldn't want to do that if I wasn't sure it would resolve the issue.)

 

[MacCheetah3]

That seems par for the course.

I have a 2TB HDD for one of my encrypted Time Machine backups.

Available space: ~708 GB
Drive power on to password prompt: ~59 seconds
Password prompt on screen: ~1 minute, 39 seconds
Total time to mount: ~2 minutes, 38 seconds

Unfortunately, a lot of the cause is an encrypted Time Machine volume is forced to be used with APFS. APFS is a good file system, however, its optimization is for modern hardware.

Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To

After 16 months of using and testing APFS—Apple's new file system—I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters).

eshop.macsales.com

Should you enable defragmentation on APFS hard drives?

You’re stuck using hard disks with High Sierra or later. Could enabling defragmentation on them overcome the performance problems of APFS?

eclecticlight.co

 

[frou]

I have been experiencing this ever since macOS Monterey. 4TB USB drives taking up to 5 minutes for their volume to mount.