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APFS Is Not Optional (apple.com)
From a new Apple knowledge base article: When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.
I had to read some more to actually understand WTF this was about. It seems this APFS is some new, flash device optimized, encrypted filesystem for Apple products that is supposed to replace the incredibly crappy HFS+.
The good: it makes your drives faster/better
The bad: many people are quesy about touching their data structures and don't understand the importance of backups.
It's a non-story, we've known about this for a few years and it's already been rolled out to the entire iOS codebase.
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It's already been beta tested on all iOS devices for the past half year or so, with no widely reported incidents whatsoever. Also, some recent point macOS update already did a safe dummy conversion of everyone's disk behind the scenes, reported the results back to Apple and then discarded the changes; again, with no incidents that anyone noticed. So, uhm, yeah... I think the beta test is pretty much done at this point.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Re the actual technical merits:
I'm not a Mac guy, so I had to look this up: Apple File System (APFS) is a decent modern filesystem with most features you'd expect from something developed somewhat recently. Here's a FS comparison where you can compare it to the latest and greatest competing formats like Linux's ex4 and Btrfs, Sun's (Oracle's) ZFS, and of course Microsoft's NTFS.
Features uncommon elsewhere include native snapshotting, encryption, and error correction.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
whipslash, if you still come around this site, could you please do something about msmash?
This submission should be considered totally unacceptable for the front page. The topic matter is interesting and very relevant, but the summary itself is beyond atrocious. As you can see, it is completely lacking any and all context. I can't see how any editor would look at this submission and think it's anything but garbage. Yet apparently msmash considered it good enough to put on the front page of this site!
This isn't the first time I've seen shitty summaries put on the front page by msmash. But it is one of the worst examples I can think of. This summary is just so utterly horrid.
Could you please seriously consider removing msmash's editorial duties and responsibilities? This summary suggests to me that msmash should not be putting submissions on the front page. It doesn't matter if this ended up on the front page intentionally or accidentally. Regardless of the specifics, this summary in this form should not have ever ended up on the front page here.
Please consider replacing msmash with an editor who is at least somewhat capable of posting summaries that aren't complete shit like this one is.
What gives you the idea APFS is "two months old"? It's been announced in June 2016, at which point it must have been pretty darn complete already, and it's been running on millions of iOS devices for the past half year with virtually no incident whatsoever.
And nobody's forcing you to upgrade to High Sierra, unlike Microsoft's extremely aggressive Windows upgrade push. That would be a comparable point, if Apple did a virtually automatic upgrade without your consent. Including a new file system in a major system upgrade is a far cry from that.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
APFS does not checksum user data: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-analysis-of-the-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/3/#h4
It seems APFS is automatic on flash storage, but not on spinning disks for reasons relating to the security of data-deletion.
Flash storage without strong encryption is insecure - since the Flash Translation Layer abstracts the Logical Block Address from the Physical Block Address for wear-levelling purposes, and the drive includes a pool of additional storage space that cannot be accessed directly. Therefore secure file deletion is not possible - files cannot be securely overwritten.
In the past, Apple have withdrawn 'secure delete' (overwriting deleted files) from their operating systems for this reason.
Full disk encryption sidesteps this issue since destroying the key that encrypted the file prevents the file from being recovered, even if it's in the wear-levelling reserved pool.
Reading through Apple's information about APFS, it seems Apple are moving to a file-system that's encrypted on a per-file basis to permit secure deletion of individual files, not just a single-key per container system that only allows secure wiping of the entire container.
Security and privacy are fundamental in the design of Apple File System. That's why Apple File System implements strong full-disk encryption, encrypting files and all sensitive metadata.
Multi-key encryption with per-file keys for file data and a separate key for sensitive metadata.
Multi-key encryption ensures the integrity of user data. Even if someone were to compromise the physical security of the device and gain access to the device key, they still couldn't decrypt the user's files.
I had to read some more to actually understand WTF this was about. It seems this APFS is some new, flash device optimized, encrypted filesystem for Apple products that is supposed to replace the incredibly crappy HFS+.
You can call HFS+ "crappy" all you want; but in the many, many years I have used HFS and HFS+ it has NEVER:
1. Lost a single byte of data.
2. Ever, Ever needed Defragmenting.
WTF ELSE is a Filesystem SUPPOSED to do, anyway?
Nope. Not even close. Other operating systems tend to be much more accommodating. Either the OS vendor itself is more accommodating or the end users pick up the slack.
You're so full of shit it's running out your ears.
Natively, macOS can read/write the following filesystems:
APFS, HFS, HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ext2 (or maybe later).
And with MacFuse, it can read/write more.
https://osxfuse.github.io/
So, what were you saying, again?
Workable, and thankfully Time Machine and Apple's Recovery Mode works so well, but damn you'd better have a reliable Time Machine drive, and better yet some install media with your last working Mac OS.
Actually, in addition to the "Recovery Partition", OSX/macOS has had the ability for quite some time to automagically download and install the ORIGINAL OS for your particular Mac, and/or to create a USB Installer. No "Install discs", "Recovery Partition", or TM backup needed.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-...
The previous version of the OS won't boot from APFS. So instead of being able to surgically excise enough of the OS to let you reinstall the previous OS (IIRC, this minimally amounts to turning off system integrity protection, booting from an external drive or recovery partition, and 'rm'ing a handful of files, but I usually nuke all of /System plus about a dozen files at the root level), you have to:
And worse, because it modifies the filesystem, you can't even take the shortcut of dd'ing it to a new disk to make up for not having a proper backup ahead of time. Your previous filesystem metadata is *gone*, so the only thing you can do if you don't have a backup is dd to a new disk, run Carbon Copy Cloner ($), and likely reinstall all your apps because the copy protection files have different inode numbers (well, the HFS+ synthetic equivalent of an inode number).
So instead of taking all of three minutes not including the install time and posing essentially zero risk to the user's data, a filesystem-replacing downgrade takes the better part of a day and leaves you with your backup as the only copy of your data during the entire period. Instead of being a low-risk downgrade that I would do without giving it a second thought, it's a downgrade that I would strongly advise against attempting even by the most technically adept people.
Apple should have waited a full release after the filesystem was *bootable* before even *considering* upgrading existing volumes. They should, however, set up *new* volumes with the new filesystem. But migrating existing disks the moment you consider it to be robust enough for a root volume is just plain insane. This makes me think that I should skip the next OS X release entirely and wait for the following major version. It's way too risky a change to not be under the user's control.
The forced upgrade was terrifying enough on iOS where, on average, the only thing of value is a handful of photos that haven't been copied to your computer or iCloud yet, where app developers aren't doing their own crazy copy protection schemes, and where I trust the backups to be complete. (For example, I can tell you horror stories of users losing all their photos because of Time Machine not backing up bundles that are open and Apple's software stupidly storing everything in an opaque library bundle for no good reason.) IMO, forcing upgrades on OS X so soon is, frankly, nuts...
...and completely unnecessary, too. I'm sure, being Apple, that the upgrade process happens silently in the background, similar to the way encryption happens, in which case there's nothing preventing them from adding a single button to Disk Utility that says "Upgrade volume to APFS" and asking the user whether to upgrade during the installation process.
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