ikramerica
macrumors 68020
I notice a note that you can’t decrypt time machine drives. So how does that work then?
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Apple to Drop Support for Encrypted Mac OS Extended Drives Next Year
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chrono1081
macrumors G3
This. I legit don't know what the other poster is on about but none of what he stated is true.
boswald
macrumors 68030
Is this due to some kind of exploit or is it a performance increase? Does it take a lot of processing power to encrypt/decrypt a drive? Us laymen are curious.
hovscorpion12
macrumors 68040
So, just to be clear, if I have an HFS+ formatted external spinning drive that is not itself encrypted, but which has a password-protected DMG on it, that DMG will still be accessible?
I am willing to convert to APFS, but want to be sure that I have to before I bother. (Or should I simply do it anyway?)
Thanks.
...and which will probably be the only one that Macs bought in 2028 can run, and unsupported after 2030.
But hey, any data more than 6 years old is worthless, right?
Apple started phasing out the floppy nearly 30 years ago, yet I can still plug in a 3.5" floppy drive and read discs today (and, yes, most of them still work apart from a bunch that were baked, frozen and flooded in my garage). The first MacBook Pros with no optical drive came out in 2012, but 14 years later I can plug in an external drive and read CDs/DVDs (I must finish re-ripping my music CDs as FLAC at some point).
Of course, nobody wants or needs a modern computer with a bulky CD or floppy drive built in - I'd already replaced the optical drive in my MacBook with a HD by the time Apple dripped them... but that's a lot different from dropping support for a format - and rendering people's media collections and data archives useless - after somewhere between 5-10 years.
I believe that there's a HFS+ module for Linux - don't know if it supports encryption.
That's not true. APFS is a more modern filesystem with many improvements over HFS+, but HFS+ had numerous optimizations for spinning disks which are still relevant to those who use them (and which were more cost effective at large sizes and even more so with the spike in SSD prices).
I'd be surprised if this is significant given the origin of HFS+ and general bloat in macOS.
I doubt system performance will be impacted by this but agree everyone should understand that HFS+ will not be viable much longer. Especially as a read/write filesystem. I've made predictions in other threads it will go read-only in a few versions of macOS and potentially dropped completely in the mid-2030s.
GMShadow
macrumors 68030
Yeah, you'll be all good. They're just removing support for the HFS+ Encrypted formatting type for the disk itself.
How well does APFS work with HDDs?
Last I checked, APFS was heavily optimized for SSD and rather problematic worh HDDs, but that was a while ago.
Has APFS matured enough now to work with HDDs?
Last I checked, APFS was heavily optimized for SSD and rather problematic worh HDDs, but that was a while ago.
Has APFS matured enough now to work with HDDs?
goobot
macrumors 604
PBG4 Dude
macrumors 603
I put APFS on a 4TB spinning external HDD and it was a complete nightmare that ended up with me copying all the data off the drive and reformatting it in HFS+. HFS+ has been working fine since though.
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More likely the encryption relies on some legacy x86-era library code that they don't want to maintain, maybe something that is part of Rosetta2 (which is going away at the same time)?
tkermit
macrumors 68040
Not sure what problems you ran into. For performance issues, it may help to enable APFS defragmentation (disabled by default)
Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz@mastodon.social)
Three days ago, I noticed an external HDD's write performance had deteriorated to about 2-5 MB/s, making me wonder if it was about to fail - or if it is an APFS performance issue. I subsequently learned about APFS defragmentation and enabled it for the HDD's APFS container via diskutil apfs...
mastodon.social
PBG4 Dude
macrumors 603
I ran into a “errors failed to be fixed. Please copy data off this drive asap” message (paraphrased)in Disk Utility. This was when running First Aid.Not sure what problems you ran into. For performance issues, it may help to enable APFS defragmentation (disabled by default)
Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz@mastodon.social)
Three days ago, I noticed an external HDD's write performance had deteriorated to about 2-5 MB/s, making me wonder if it was about to fail - or if it is an APFS performance issue. I subsequently learned about APFS defragmentation and enabled it for the HDD's APFS container via diskutil apfs...
LogicalApex
macrumors 68000
I disagree here.
File systems should be supported for as long as possible unless there are serious technical challenges that prevent it. This means that someone who has an HFS+ drive they encrypted for archival storage may lose access to their data.
That sucks. Especially since the person accessing that archival drive could be a family member dealing with their aged parent or their estate.
I’m reading it as more complicated. Move everything off the hard drive, wipe it, reformat it with a file system not optimized for spinning disks, encrypt it, then copy all your stuff back.
If you have a few 8TB encrypted hard drives in your fire safe, best to make them less secure or pony up for a few 8TB SSDs (in this economy?!?) that will play nice with APFS.
Or just don’t update your Mac until there’s a better solution.
canadianreader
macrumors 68000
I've been using APFS on HDDs for years never had any issues
I believe the Apple Disk Image (DMGs) is a general container format that supports multiple filesystems types including HFS+. A DMG may contain an HFS+ filesystem and I believe in the past these were allowed to be encrypted. The default filesystem created within these since at least Catalina has been APFS.
The hybrid format was however an easy option to choose for DMGs and that structure was a combination of HFS+ and ISO9660, etc. On systems that don't support HFS+, the data would still be accessible via the ISO9660 filesystem structure though with perhaps some loss of MacOS functionality (not sure what haven't played with this scenario).
con2apple
macrumors 6502
Or Windows. And experience everyday why Apple will never have an important computer system.
Not that this company would care. It makes so much money that it can afford to alienate a portion of its majority of customers every year.
But it's interesting:
A says: “Apple is right, because HFS+ is older than the current version”
B presents some arguments against this position
and you say: “Don't give me facts. This is a matter of faith."
In different words.
tkermit
macrumors 68040
CoreStorage isn't used for encrypting disk images, so nothing should change in that respect (regardless of the file system). You can check by running
Code:
diskutil cs list
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Depends on the DMG. The encryption on the filesystem in the DMG is independent of the HFS+ filesystem on the spinning drive. Either or neither or both may be encrypted.
Unclear from what has been provided so far whether encrypted DMG will become inaccessible. If so, you could convert them to a different type of encrypted DMG without converting your entire drive. If I had a spinning drive happily using (unencrypted) JHFS+ but with a password-protected HFS+ DMG on it, that is what I would do (i.e. I wouldn't jump to convert the whole drive to APFS).
canadianreader
macrumors 68000
I agree with you at the same time they removed the option of creating HFS+ encrypted drives in Disk Utility since macOS Big Sur.