It doesn't. All of my most highly technical engineer friends use Macs (and I do too), so that wasn't meant as an insult to Macs or their users. Rather, I just meant that if you're doing stuff at the level of multibooting an OS, porting apps from one of the OSes to the other, and using the other OS's own drive for read/write, then you should be capable of (and expected to) figuring out how to make a VFAT partition or similar for data sharing.
Forgive me!
I, too am an engineering type. An embedded Dev. For about the past 40 years, in fact. And whenever possible during that time, I have used Macs for my hw/sw dev. Work. Even back in the day, when it was fairly difficult to find ANY dev. Tools for microcontrollers for Macs!!!
So sorry for my uncalled-for ruidity. I just get trigger-happy battling all the AC Apple-Haters...
And UDF. Why does everyone forget about UDF? It was always the best choice for external flash media since it's supported by all the major operating systems.
Sorry, it wasn't on the list I was looking at, and I didn't think about it.
But I tend to use FAT32 for USB Sticks, since it also enjoys universal support.
Apple will most probably drop HFS+ support within 12 months.
Remember, this company *removed* FTP support from Finder. The code was written, stable, and the format extremely well established...yet they removed it for...reasons???
I think it was removed for Security reasons, actually.
Indeed, it's probably going to stay an option for non-boot drives forever (technology "forever", meaning until the next major platform shift or so). It's basically "done", they just need to keep compiling the modules in.
exactly. Like Carbon support. I think you can still run Carbon Apps. for example, QuickTime 7.
What is genuinely interesting is whether the Time Capsule will see some development. The snapshotting features should make it possible to build a much better incremental backup system: here's hoping that development time goes into that.
From what I understand, they will either have to leave Time Machine in HFS+, or do pretty much a complete rewrite.
As you say, that will be interesting if it happens...
It probably only cares about the drive with the operating system on it.
No.
It "cares" about ANY SSD. These are still the early days of APFS, and Apple feels like they need to concentrate on optimizing SSD performance first. They will work on HDD support later.
BTW, this does NOT mean that APFS works only on SSDs; but certain things, like Time Machine, need rework to work with APFS, from what I have read.
As somebody else pointed out above though, this does make the upgrade to high sierra rather one way. You'd better hope nothing about high sierra sucks and you'll never want to down grade to a previous version because that's going to be a right PITA with this.
That's what Time Machine is for.
Weird about it, if you don't have Time Machine running now, just go spend $50 on an external HD and backup your present OS and everything else on your HD/SSD.
Jeezus, you people are fucking IGNORANT and WHINEY.
I have a USB SSD with a FAT32 partition on it. That usually does the trick.
Usually has been the best bet for USB sticks you don't know where they will be used. That's what I have always told my Mac-owning friends, if they think there is event the slightest possiblity that there USB stick will end up in a computer other than a Mac.
That's not Apple's fault. FAT is just the lowest-common-denominator Filesystem.
This has always been a problem, though. The HFS+ support in linux doesn't support journaling, for instance. The Venn diagram for those three OSs (or even any two OSs) doesn't have any overlaps that don't have their own particular version of a tradeoff.
Sounds like a problem in Linux, not Mac. I mean, does Linux bend over backwards to provide support for ext4 to Apple? Does Microsoft bend over backwards to provide support for, well, ANYTHING to ANYBODY?
Yeah, I know: filesystems take a long time to mature and not lose data. You want your FS tested — widely — before you rely on it to not eat data.
Here's the thing: iOS 10.3 included an upgrade to APFS. Since March, every updated iPhone and iPad has been running this in production. Most of them have no idea, because it's basically invisible. I haven't heard of any problems stemming from this change.
So, while OS X has different (more variable, probably) use cases from the sealed systems in iOS, it's very likely that in "normal" usage, APFS is going to be reliable for folks.
And actually, on iOS 10.2 and 10.2 Upgrades, they "silently" converted the Filesystem to APFS, reported the results to Apple, then converted it back to HFS+. So, they have been "dry-running" this for over a year, and that's after a few years of in-house development and testing.
Features uncommon elsewhere include native snapshotting, encryption, and error correction.
I don't think error correction is actually part of it. Perhaps the filesystem data itself is protected, that could be true. However for the user data integrity, Apple are trusting the hardware to do the right thing. That might be fine for their SSDs, which they control themselves.
But I'm a little bit disappointed that checksumming isn't present, because I'd love to be able to just ram that filesystem on external sticks and harddrives, and know that my data is checksummed.
Well, according to the Wikipedia List, APFS DOES support Checksumming/ECC:
Interestingly, NTFS does NOT support Checksumming/ECC and ext4 only "sort of" supports Checksumming/ECC (for the Journal and Metadata only, NOT for "User Data"). Same with COW support: NTFS "?" (No), ext4 "No", APFS "Yes".
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.
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.
Now you're saying "Well, so what if it's no worse?!?!?!".
Can APFS be read by Windows machines? SAMBA? How about cameras (it says it "upgrates" flash, but does it mean USB flash or SSDs?)? What if the upgrade fails, will a downgrade work so you can get back to the old system? Does it work with all devices currently out there? If it doesn't, given no choice, can you roll back the changes?
It has been working essentially flawlessly for awhile in millions of iOS devices running iOS 10.3, and was "trial ballooned" in 10.1 and 10.2.
Mac owners, in general, aren't expected to do jack. Mac owners with the technical knowledge required to contrive the setup you describe are expected to be able to support their own inventions.
Boot Camp is an Apple product, built into the OS. Booting to Windows or another OS from a Mac is expected and supported, and this change makes that supported configuration less useful. Apple even ships drivers for Windows on the OSX install image to make specialized Mac hardware operable under Windows. Hopefully they ship at least a read-only APFS Windows driver at some point.
I would imagine that BootCamp will still work the same way it has been, which means that the "Bootcamp" Partition will be formatted as NTFS. And I would imagine that file-sharing between macOS and Windows OSes will be handled like Network Shares, through SMB.
Mac owners, in general, aren't expected to do jack. Mac owners with the technical knowledge required to contrive the setup you describe are expected to be able to support their own inventions.
...and that differs from users of other OS Platforms exactly HOW?
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:
Is HFS+ really all that crappy? I recognize that HFS+ is ancient technology (by computing standards) and doesn't support a lot of new features, but OTOH for me it has always done its job and not caused me any problems -- my files are always where I left them in the morning.
Exactly.
I have been using Macs since they were called Lisas, and in all those years, the only time I have had HFS or HFS+ lose or corrupt a byte of data was when a hard drive went suddenly and catastrophically, south. Maybe a ZFS pool would have not lost any data; but this was before that time.
HFS+ may not be the snazziest FS; but it is reliable as the day is long.
Linus agrees with me. From the Wikipedia page for HFS+: HFS Plus lacks several features considered staples of modern file systems like ZFS and NTFS. Data checksums is the most routinely cited missing feature. Additionally, the core of the filesystem uses case-insensitive NFD Unicode strings, which led Linus Torvalds to say that "HFS+ is probably the worst file-system ever."
Linus can blow me.
Let him stick to his toy, Unix-wannabe, pseudo-OS.
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It doesn't. All of my most highly technical engineer friends use Macs (and I do too), so that wasn't meant as an insult to Macs or their users. Rather, I just meant that if you're doing stuff at the level of multibooting an OS, porting apps from one of the OSes to the other, and using the other OS's own drive for read/write, then you should be capable of (and expected to) figuring out how to make a VFAT partition or similar for data sharing.
Forgive me!
I, too am an engineering type. An embedded Dev. For about the past 40 years, in fact. And whenever possible during that time, I have used Macs for my hw/sw dev. Work. Even back in the day, when it was fairly difficult to find ANY dev. Tools for microcontrollers for Macs!!!
So sorry for my uncalled-for ruidity. I just get trigger-happy battling all the AC Apple-Haters...
Mea CulpA, Mr. 4-digit UID!!!!
APFS, HFS, HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ext2 (or maybe later).
And UDF. Why does everyone forget about UDF? It was always the best choice for external flash media since it's supported by all the major operating systems.
Sorry, it wasn't on the list I was looking at, and I didn't think about it.
But I tend to use FAT32 for USB Sticks, since it also enjoys universal support.
But that's being logical.
Apple will most probably drop HFS+ support within 12 months.
Remember, this company *removed* FTP support from Finder. The code was written, stable, and the format extremely well established...yet they removed it for...reasons???
I think it was removed for Security reasons, actually.
Indeed, it's probably going to stay an option for non-boot drives forever (technology "forever", meaning until the next major platform shift or so). It's basically "done", they just need to keep compiling the modules in.
exactly. Like Carbon support. I think you can still run Carbon Apps. for example, QuickTime 7.
What is genuinely interesting is whether the Time Capsule will see some development. The snapshotting features should make it possible to build a much better incremental backup system: here's hoping that development time goes into that.
From what I understand, they will either have to leave Time Machine in HFS+, or do pretty much a complete rewrite.
As you say, that will be interesting if it happens...
It probably only cares about the drive with the operating system on it.
No.
It "cares" about ANY SSD. These are still the early days of APFS, and Apple feels like they need to concentrate on optimizing SSD performance first. They will work on HDD support later.
BTW, this does NOT mean that APFS works only on SSDs; but certain things, like Time Machine, need rework to work with APFS, from what I have read.
As somebody else pointed out above though, this does make the upgrade to high sierra rather one way. You'd better hope nothing about high sierra sucks and you'll never want to down grade to a previous version because that's going to be a right PITA with this.
That's what Time Machine is for.
Weird about it, if you don't have Time Machine running now, just go spend $50 on an external HD and backup your present OS and everything else on your HD/SSD.
Jeezus, you people are fucking IGNORANT and WHINEY.
I have a USB SSD with a FAT32 partition on it. That usually does the trick.
Usually has been the best bet for USB sticks you don't know where they will be used. That's what I have always told my Mac-owning friends, if they think there is event the slightest possiblity that there USB stick will end up in a computer other than a Mac.
That's not Apple's fault. FAT is just the lowest-common-denominator Filesystem.
This has always been a problem, though. The HFS+ support in linux doesn't support journaling, for instance. The Venn diagram for those three OSs (or even any two OSs) doesn't have any overlaps that don't have their own particular version of a tradeoff.
Sounds like a problem in Linux, not Mac. I mean, does Linux bend over backwards to provide support for ext4 to Apple? Does Microsoft bend over backwards to provide support for, well, ANYTHING to ANYBODY?
So, while OS X has different (more variable, probably) use cases from the sealed systems in iOS
One of them being Boot Camp. What file system should be used for data shared among macOS, Windows, and Linux?
Whatever can be easily read by all of those. Likely some variant of FAT. But for network shares, I don't think it matters much.
Yeah, I know: filesystems take a long time to mature and not lose data. You want your FS tested — widely — before you rely on it to not eat data.
Here's the thing: iOS 10.3 included an upgrade to APFS. Since March, every updated iPhone and iPad has been running this in production. Most of them have no idea, because it's basically invisible. I haven't heard of any problems stemming from this change.
So, while OS X has different (more variable, probably) use cases from the sealed systems in iOS, it's very likely that in "normal" usage, APFS is going to be reliable for folks.
And actually, on iOS 10.2 and 10.2 Upgrades, they "silently" converted the Filesystem to APFS, reported the results to Apple, then converted it back to HFS+. So, they have been "dry-running" this for over a year, and that's after a few years of in-house development and testing.
Features uncommon elsewhere include native snapshotting, encryption, and error correction.
I don't think error correction is actually part of it. Perhaps the filesystem data itself is protected, that could be true. However for the user data integrity, Apple are trusting the hardware to do the right thing. That might be fine for their SSDs, which they control themselves.
But I'm a little bit disappointed that checksumming isn't present, because I'd love to be able to just ram that filesystem on external sticks and harddrives, and know that my data is checksummed.
Well, according to the Wikipedia List, APFS DOES support Checksumming/ECC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Interestingly, NTFS does NOT support Checksumming/ECC and ext4 only "sort of" supports Checksumming/ECC (for the Journal and Metadata only, NOT for "User Data"). Same with COW support: NTFS "?" (No), ext4 "No", APFS "Yes".
So, go argue with Wikipedia.
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.
Thanks!
Lettuce and tomato I understand because they're solid toppings. But I don't see how it's so easy to remove mayonnaise from a sandwich.
Easy!
Same way you wash dishes! Just use a Kenmore!
"Here you go! Good dog, Kenmore!"
Strat :)
LOL!
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-...
Now you're saying "Well, so what if it's no worse?!?!?!".
Can APFS be read by Windows machines? SAMBA? How about cameras (it says it "upgrates" flash, but does it mean USB flash or SSDs?)? What if the upgrade fails, will a downgrade work so you can get back to the old system? Does it work with all devices currently out there? If it doesn't, given no choice, can you roll back the changes?
It has been working essentially flawlessly for awhile in millions of iOS devices running iOS 10.3, and was "trial ballooned" in 10.1 and 10.2.
APFS does not support checksumming, which makes it worthless for a filesystem that can detect and perhaps correct bit rot.
But the way ZFS does this is kind of lame and broken anyway; since it doesn't use a "third vote".
Or are Mac owners expected
Mac owners, in general, aren't expected to do jack. Mac owners with the technical knowledge required to contrive the setup you describe are expected to be able to support their own inventions.
Boot Camp is an Apple product, built into the OS. Booting to Windows or another OS from a Mac is expected and supported, and this change makes that supported configuration less useful. Apple even ships drivers for Windows on the OSX install image to make specialized Mac hardware operable under Windows. Hopefully they ship at least a read-only APFS Windows driver at some point.
I would imagine that BootCamp will still work the same way it has been, which means that the "Bootcamp" Partition will be formatted as NTFS. And I would imagine that file-sharing between macOS and Windows OSes will be handled like Network Shares, through SMB.
Mac owners, in general, aren't expected to do jack. Mac owners with the technical knowledge required to contrive the setup you describe are expected to be able to support their own inventions.
...and that differs from users of other OS Platforms exactly HOW?
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?
the incredibly crappy HFS+
Is HFS+ really all that crappy? I recognize that HFS+ is ancient technology (by computing standards) and doesn't support a lot of new features, but OTOH for me it has always done its job and not caused me any problems -- my files are always where I left them in the morning.
Exactly.
I have been using Macs since they were called Lisas, and in all those years, the only time I have had HFS or HFS+ lose or corrupt a byte of data was when a hard drive went suddenly and catastrophically, south. Maybe a ZFS pool would have not lost any data; but this was before that time.
HFS+ may not be the snazziest FS; but it is reliable as the day is long.
APFS does have checksums, and can operate both in a case insensitive, or case sensitive mode.
I don't know about checksums, but HFS+ can be Case-Sensitive, too. The default is, for backward-compatibility reasons, Case-Insensitive.
Linus agrees with me. From the Wikipedia page for HFS+:
HFS Plus lacks several features considered staples of modern file systems like ZFS and NTFS. Data checksums is the most routinely cited missing feature. Additionally, the core of the filesystem uses case-insensitive NFD Unicode strings, which led Linus Torvalds to say that "HFS+ is probably the worst file-system ever."
Linus can blow me.
Let him stick to his toy, Unix-wannabe, pseudo-OS.
With the right series of three adapters after spending hundreds of dollars, yes.
LIAR.
Apples still have USB ports?
Yes. The MacBook Pros have 2 or 4, depending, and the 2017 iMacs have 6.