That was changed before High Sierra shipped, wasn't it? It's supposed to be exclusive to SSD for now.
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APFS Bug in macOS High Sierra Can Cause Data Loss When Writing to Disk Images
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That was changed before High Sierra shipped, wasn't it? It's supposed to be exclusive to SSD for now.
It is absolutely comparable. Both NTFS and HFS+ were aging systems, stretched far beyond their expected use-cases in modern environments. Don't try to pretend that anybody loved HFS+. Apple pushed APFS out to hundreds of millions of iOS devices in a minor update. I haven't heard of any issues. They did the same to all of the millions of macOS devices out there, and this is the first time I've heard of a significant bug. All software has bugs; they get shaken-out over time by reports like this from real users. The kinds of real users Microsoft doesn't have testing ReFS.
About this bug: it's well-defined, easily reproducible and fixable with a driver update. It would be 1000x worse if there was a poorly-defined, hard-to-reproduce issue which was, for example, writing corrupted metadata for your original files. This is simply a silent failure which should instead produce an error. The consequences, of course, can be severe, but the bug itself is simple to fix and fairly limited in scope. What percentage of Mac users do you think are even in danger of encountering this bug? Maybe 5%?
These kinds of bugs are perfectly normal in any software. What is new is the level of publicity they get.
We're talking APFS sparse disk images not erroring when expanding. Probably closer to 0.5% (1 in 200) than 5% (1 in 20). And that might still be much too high.
No, I meant "unit testing" - Google it. It was sarcasm, of course they must be doing them. Right. Right?
I believe they were going to start on SSDs, and port it to spinning-disks later. I hope they don't ignore HDDs... but this is Apple. If they made APFS exclusive to SSDs, I would be disappointed but not entirely surprised.
Even though the Mac may use SSDs internally, HDDs still make sense for external storage due to high capacity and low cost. You might reasonably want that storage to be encrypted with APFS's more granular options, or might want to make clones or snapshots.
Terrible bugs didn't start in mac OS X, either. Classic "System Software"/Mac OS was a road with many potholes. Hope you didn't want to boot AND print every release.
Yeah, my understanding is that the sort of structures you'd need to run it decently on an HD just aren't there. Instead, it's built on top of structures spread way the hell out on the SSD.
Nothing precludes them from caching those structures later in a single place for an HD, if they decide it'll work and is worth it.
Time to ditch yearly updates and start rolling out thoroughly-tested stable, solid and refined OSes every other year or so (again). There aren’t even the features to justify such big upheavals every 12 months any more, and feature introductions have become more phased in recent editions too.
How does unit testing help in this scenario? Clearly the problem is that they didn’t think of the edge case in the first place. A fuzz test may have been an option, but a unit test only works when you know what to test. (Also, the problem is clearly one of interaction of multiple components, so an integration test would’ve been a better fit. But again, that presupposes they knew about the problem in the first place, which clearly they did not.)
Wow. Can we please get back to releasing new OS's over many years instead of a new OS every single year? I sure do miss those days. It may have taken some time but certain OS's achieved rock solid stability. 10.6.8 comes to mind.
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If Steve were alive, Apple would still release imperfect software that others find bugs and flaws with. Apple isn't perfect.
Yeah, and that sounds even worse. Planning should have been paramount when it comes to FS. If it happened in my niche software that might have been no big deal, but it's a different caliber here.
Just think about these various text parsing issues that all sound too reminiscent of simply uncaught exceptions. There's no excuse for missing graceful fallback to an "unknown unicode character" symbol. We've heard about these issues 3-4 times already? I bet the fixes were just quickly stitched half-solutions, or these would have been story of the past.
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No, sorry you are wrong. High Sierra doesn't convert disks to APFS when installed on HDD or Fusion drives but Disk Utility or diskutil on High Sierra will happily format an external HDD to APFS. I have some LaCie drives that I APFS formatted recently with 10.13.3. so I'm certain it can be done. Whether or not it's a good idea, it is possible to do.
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no it is not, please check your facts
I'm sure they did. Before they start coding, there will have been lots of prototyping and planning - including test-planning. That's standard for any engineering project of this reach and complexity.
Nonetheless, bugs do occur. They get fixed, and tests are added to fill the gaps which were exposed. Of course, the tests are also software. Sometimes there are bugs in the tests. It's a problem with no absolute solution.
You seem to be angry because Apple's engineers failed to meet the standard of absolute perfection. I would encourage you to not only consider this one bug, but also how successful the APFS rollout has been that this is the biggest issue we have found to-date.
I noticed some inconsistencies when using my backups early on so made that decision to stay away from AFPS as you say.
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I use CCC. But my comment was about High Sierra in general, not just this bug.
Actually, not. I don't say it's GUI-simple; but you CAN avoid APFS if you REALLY want to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System#Support
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And, you can actually avoid it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System#Support
Seems like a "good idea in theory"; but not so wonderful in practice, especially for a filesystem. One of the tenets being "You don't test on the same hardware/system as deployed to."
Ick. I want my filesystem tested on the actual hardware it is to be used-on, or at least, as close as possible to that ideal...
Mine does this on Sierra. Only thing I notice is its when my external hard drive is spinning back up (whether its TM or trying to access something inside it).
Most people have been using HFS+ for over a decade with no problems, and they don't even know what it is. You make it sound like it's been causing issues for average users. The only frustration I can think of is sizing a very large directory.
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Possibly everyone who uses Time Machine on an AFPS-formatted drive. Edit: Nvm, someone said TM won't back up to AFPS-formatted disk images.
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Did they say they will stop yearly releases, or did they just say they will focus on improving what they put out going forward?
From what I interpreted from what they said, they did not specify if they had chanced their policy of yearly offerings.
I hope they stop yearly offerings and go back to focusing on overall functionality first instead of always new functions or eye candy to keep a certain marketing segment(s) interested.....and most know the group(s) they are targeting (understandable of course)...
An OS is useless if it doesn’t do its primary function: To Provide an environment for apps to living in harmony and function as they were intended to function.
“Get back to the basics” should be their model for now when the foundation is not stable, especially when overdoing on “look” and “tricks”, destabilizes too much of the OS basic function.
That is what happens when the balance of final decisions swings toward a designer and a bean counter who makes the final decisions...
My opinion of course..