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Not to mention the numerous times where TM casually asks to wipe your backup history because the integrity test didn't pass without errors. Usually this can be fixed with a few commands copied off a blogpost that must be getting thousands of hits every day.

It seems obvious to me that TM was intended to run on a snapshotting filesystem such as ZFS* and when this didn't materialize the engineers tried their best to make it work using the tools available to them. Unfortunately thsoe were sparsebundles and hardlinks. I would hope that TM will get updated to use APFS snapshots sooner rather than later, assuming the feature is proven and stable. iOS makes use of APFS snapshots for rolling back failed updates, so one would assume it is.

* http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/15/apple_and_zfs/ and https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/08/4995/