> encrypted Time Machine to a network location

this has a bonus feature where it will slowly corrupt itself over time and offer to start a completely new backup instead.

> I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.

One thing I have learned with (current) Apple is to never trust their commitment to support something they're not using. And even be wary for stuff they are using. (in my mind, a core technical difference between Microsoft & Apple is that MS will bend over backwards for backwards compatibility, whereas Apple will drop it as soon as they can, and sometimes sooner still)

They replaced their use of HFS+ with APFS in 2017, so it's had a good run.

>It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS

Be happy they let you backup to HDDs at all. :) They don't sell HDDs, so I'm half amazed they still work whatsoever.

I don't think APFS was designed or tuned with HDDs in mind, but it will work just fine. Especially for backups where random read/write performance is not important.

This might be a blessing in disguise for you. The silent data rot of HFS+ is what pushed me to ZFS. I would never go back to HFS+.

Wait, you can do encrypted backup to a network location but not to HFS+? What if the network location is just your own Mac?

Ok I may be an idiot, but I just have a permanently attached external disk that does Time Machine, what am I missing out on? Why network location? Or are you backing up massive amounts of data? (for me it’s just 2TB)

Can you use OpenZFS?

https://www.openzfsonosx.org/

ZFS