Time Machine Backup issues with AXE7800/AXE95
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Installed the new router on 11/3/23 and have been trying to get Time Machine backups to work reliably with an attached USB drive to the router. Here's my findings so far. First off, the drive cannot be formatted with APFS as it is not supported. So I reformatted the drive with Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted). Using this article, I set up the TM on the router
https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/2729/
I was then able to connect to the drive from my MacBook Pro using SMB -- turned out this is unnecessary for TM to find the disk. When I started the backup, it appeared to work initially but upon checking it in a few minutes, it failed. I tried this multiple times and couldn't get it to complete the backup. Upon further research, I came across this article about disabling journaling
https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/forum/topic/253936
This seemed to have allowed the backup to work and continue. However, it was doing the backup over 12 hours (around 250GB of data) and it just stopped with a message saying it's waiting to complete the first backup when power is plugged in, turned out I needed to enable "Back up on battery power", so I need to start all over again.
I have also read that the sparsebundle can get easily corrupted and I'll have to redo this all over again. Is this a battle I can't win in the long run?
Yeah, I have read on some articles that it is slow, I just didn't know how slow it is. The main issue is that it does not work with APFS or OS Extended w Journaling, so I am now trying the ExFAT and it is also very slow but seems to be backing up so far, just another 13 hours to go 
Will see if it actually finishes. Do you happen to know if there is any functional difference, other than speed, for TM to back up on ExFAT vs APFS vs OS Extended w Journaling?