Apple is Upgrading Millions of iOS Devices To a New Modern File System Today (theverge.com)

Apple today began rolling out iOS 10.3, the latest point update to its mobile operating system. iOS 10.3 brings with it several new features, chief among which is a new file system -- called the Apple File System (APFS). From a report: It's a file system that was originally announced at WWDC last year, and it's designed with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV in mind. Apple has been using its 31-year-old Hierarchical File System (HFS) for iOS devices so far. It was originally designed for Macs with floppy or hard disks, and not for modern mobile devices with solid state storage. Even its successor, HFS+, still doesn't address the needs of these mobile devices enough. Apple's new APFS is designed to scale across these new types of devices and take advantage of flash or SSD storage. It's also engineered with encryption as a primary feature, and even supports features like snapshots so restoring files on a Mac or even an iOS device might get a lot easier in the future.

Comments

Catch?

[nwaack]

Hmmm...this actually sounds like a useful upgrade. Given Apple's recent "innovations," I'm left wondering what the catch is. There must be something in this update that screws over the customer somewhere.

Re:Catch?

[Proudrooster]

Apple File System is designed to avoid metadata corruption caused by system crashes. Instead of overwriting existing metadata records in place, it writes entirely new records, points to the new ones and then releases the old ones. This avoids a crash during an update resulting in a corrupted record containing partial old and partial new data. It also avoids having to write the change twice as happens with an existing HFS+ Journaled file system where changes are written first to the journal and then to the Catalog file.[3]

Still no checksum for user data like ext4. But it might help iPhones will sudden battery failure.

Re:Catch?

[GerbilSoft]

Ext4 doesn't have user data checksums, only metadata: https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/i...

Re:Catch?

[Goaway]

That sounds reasonable, except for every single part of the statement being a complete falsehood.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

You mean, like... using Samsung displays and RAM and having their CPUs manufactured in Samsung-owned foundries?

Re: Catch?

[mspohr]

Software kills computers.
I have a 2010 MacBook Air which became progressively more stupid with each software "upgrade" to the point where it was unusable.
I replaced it with a cheap Chromebook which has much better performance.
However, it's tax time so I broke out the old MacBook to do my taxes. On a whim I installed the Opera browser and I feel like I have a new MacBook! Safari, FireFox and Chrome browsers would peg the CPU at 100% for literally minutes while they did god knows what. With Opera, CPU only goes to about 80% for a few seconds (ad block and VPN turned on).
I'd like to know what the problem is with those other browsers but I'm happy now with Opera.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

I'm not sure that holds true; I've owned a number of Samsung and Apple devices over the past decade (in fact, I currently own many of both) and, to be quite honest, I'd say I've been watching Samsung's product engineering improve while Apple's has been on a steady decline for the past 6-7 years or so.

We're going to disagree on that point, of course, and that's fine. What you look for in a well-engineered product, and what I look for in the same, are different, because we have different needs and we use our products differently. In that vein, I'll grant Apple a clear win on the iPad, but Samsung takes the win on phones; I use the two classes of device differently, so my needs for one necessarily differ from my needs for the other. I'll also point out that Samsung covers a wider variety of products than Apple so, naturally, their focus will appear more spread out; these various lines are designed, engineered, manufactured, and distributed by distinct groups within Samsung, though, each of which has its own focus. Apple, meanwhile, cannibalizes one team to shift focus to another product line, which is why I observe that their product engineering is on a decline; they've very much focus-shifted toward mobile, and that certainly shows in the improvements the iPad has seen, all the while their computer lineup is all but rotting.

It's sad, really, as I would love to have taken what I just spent on a new PC build and spent it on more recent Mac workstation hardware; but there is no more recent Mac workstation hardware. The Mac Pro is 4 years old and was already a year out of date at launch, and I simply need more processing power than any current Mac system can give me, as well as the ability to run Adobe apps (not as a primary function, mind you, but I do need them running natively). The combination of those realities forced me to make some concessions, such as not running a native UNIX-like environment, as I can't run MacOS on fast-enough hardware and I can't run Adobe apps natively under Linux.

I'm not alone in this, either. Where I used to see new Macs being bought left and right for production environments, I'm seeing PC builds rolling in as their replacements; and for the reasons stated above.

Mind you, Samsung is no better in that regard; but, then, they've never really billed themselves as a company that provides a superior desktop or workstation. Apple, on the other hand, claims just that, while their product engineering fails to deliver on the promise.

And I really am missing the native UNIX-like environment that can also run all of my applications natively. This is not an attack on Apple, I'm not senselessly attacking them or putting them down; I am dissenting, in the hope that, come the time for my next hardware upgrade, my voice will be heard. And I'm not just bitching on Slashdot, I communicate my dissatisfaction to colleagues of mine at Apple, most of whom work on the software side of things and agree with me, as they could do a lot more with the software side of things on more capable hardware. Unfortunately, though they relay the complaints (often before they've even heard them from me, as they have the same complaints), their voices also appear to go unheard.

But, mostly, I was pointing out the irony in calling Samsung "Samdung" when Apple uses many Samsung parts in their own products. This, of course, is amplified by the fact that, historically, when Apple moves away from Samsung parts (e.g. Retina displays), customer satisfaction decreases (e.g. Panasonic pink tint) until Apple brings Samsung back into the fold.

And, here's the rub: Apple fans get to foot the bill when Apple sues Samsung. Samsung isn't raising the cost of Samsung consumer goods to cover the legal bills and settlements; they're raising the prices they charge Apple for parts. Go ahead and laugh your way to the bank every time Apple wins a patent suit against Samsung; you'll need to make an extra withdrawal to cover your next Apple purchase.

Part of me wi

About time... HFS+ is crap

[Proudrooster]

In an interview at Melbourne's linux.conf.au conference, Linus Torvalds called the standard file system of Mac OS X "complete and utter crap." Mac fans are only slightly outraged, pointing out that HFS+ isn't really "complete and utter crap," rather, it's just slightly crap-ish.

On a personal level, I have had multiple corrupt HFS+ filesystems, one of which was unrecoverable. I tried switching to exFAT which also proved to be corruptible but repairable. Now I just store any data I care about on a NAS running a linux ext4 filesystem.

Hopefully, AFS will fix these corruption problems. I have been sending Apple upgrade suggestions for years. Looks like they finally got around to it. One filesystem to rule them all, but will it support upper/lower case?

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[AaronD12]

> upper/lower case Are you talking about HFS+ Case Sensitive? It's been there for years in Mac OS X, though it can cause issues with sloppy applications that rely on case insensitivity.

Backup Your Device

[lazarus]

In the spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" this may actually be one of those times you want to back up your device before upgrading.

Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backup

[zerofoo]

If you lose data due to a corrupt filesystem - it's not the filesystem's fault that you didn't backup your data.

Even if you had the most reliable filesystem in the world - it would, most likely be running on spinning disks or flash media - both fail quite regularly.

Backup your data frequently and test your backups regularly.

Security

[xushi]

Will this add any security against NSA / Immigration trying to steal your data?

Will this affect known methods for breaking in?

[Glarimore]

I'm wondering if this will affect known methods used by law enforcement to break into iPhones in high-profile cases (such as the San Bernardino shooting). Anyone have any insight as to whether the underlying encryption has an affect on those attack vectors?

Trying to avoid talking about whether it is a good or bad thing that police can break into iPhones when necessary -- just curious if anyone has any technical insight.

Re:Will this affect known methods for breaking in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/20...

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[omnichad]

Even if you don't lose data, you still lose uptime. Backups are only one layer.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

Oh, zfs! I remember it corrupting all my file systems while I was a university student. Maybe it was the Linux implementation, I don't know, but I'm never touching that fs again. Also my NAS corrupted its file system more recently and guess which fs it was?

I have been running ZFS for ~5 years now across ~40 servers. Never failed once.

I even had one particular server with 8 drives in a RAIDZ2 lose a drive while two others started failing. I replaced them all successfully. Less than 12 hours later two additional drives failed and a third started acting flakey. I replaced them all successfully. No data loss. I'll trust AUFS when I see it handle weird hardware BS like that.

Re: APFS is modern?

[fnj]

I'll second the observation. I have found ZFS (on both FreeBSD and linux) to be phenomenally reliable through several years. I have no worry at all when power failure hits my 75 TB worth of RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 storage pools using a total of 25 drives. I don't even bother with a UPS. Disclaimer - my pools are only occasionally written to; mostly read.

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[Waccoon]

If a filesystem is crap, I think I'll still blame the filesystem, thank you.