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

Posted by msmash on from the new-file-system dept.

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.

8 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Catch? by nwaack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Catch? by Proudrooster · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Catch? by GerbilSoft · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    3. Re:Catch? by Goaway · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. About time... HFS+ is crap by Proudrooster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backup by zerofoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Security by xushi · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  5. Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu by omnichad · · Score: 4, Insightful

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