You shouldn't feel the need to defend yourself from the trolls, don't worry about it. Every Apple exec of course knows every email they fire off externally, and several internally, are going to make the Apple rumor mill, and I firmly believe it's why they respond. He didn't just want Jon to know, he bet everyone would, an unofficial press release.
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Craig Federighi Says Apple Intends to Address APFS Support for Fusion Drives 'Very Soon'
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You shouldn't feel the need to defend yourself from the trolls, don't worry about it. Every Apple exec of course knows every email they fire off externally, and several internally, are going to make the Apple rumor mill, and I firmly believe it's why they respond. He didn't just want Jon to know, he bet everyone would, an unofficial press release.
There's no practical difference between the consequences of losing a drive in a single-drive system and losing a drive in Fusion. Either way, without a backup, you're toast. Would anyone say, "You have an SSD, you don't need a backup?"
People get hung up over the the notion that having two drives increases the odds of a failure. Some seem to believe the odds go up exponentially (show me the math!). Others, linearly (2 drives = 2x odds of failure). I'd suggest that the odds don't even double, due to the higher reliability of the Flash portion of the array, but still, we're splitting hairs. The odds of having to restore from a backup are increased, but the need for a backup is the same as it would be with any system. Even RAID should be backed up!
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As to whether Apple should continue to sell spinning HD-equipped iMacs... Even if all new Macs came with Flash drives, it changes little. Apple is trying to extend the benefits of APFS to existing Macs (like my Late 2013 iMac with 3 GB Fusion drive).
Possibly, a key reason they are going to keep pursuing APFS for Spinning Disks is Time Machine. There are substantial benefits (starting with disk space savings, but extending to things like operational speed and data reliability) to using APFS for Time Machine. Does anyone seriously believe that the public will start buying SSDs for their backup drives??? No, Apple needs to keep working on APFS for spinners.
Do you do backups every second? Every minute?
Do you do backups every hour, always? Even on vacation? How about while presenting at a customer's?
Even ignoring the reality that most people don't do backups at all, even when a backup is properly set up, "you should've had a backup" is just callous.
He said High Sierra is fully baked in his keynote approach. What should I make of it? Do I have to actually bake it in an oven??
Of course it does. The death of an SSD or HDD also corrupts all the data in non-Fusion-Drive setups.
The SSD in the Fusion Drive is not for additional storage space purposes (even though it does provide additional storage space). It is for the acceleration of access to the frequently used data. The reliability of the SSD component is many times that of the HDD component, so the combined risk is not like having two identical drives in a stripped RAID.
You should have a backup.
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You sure about that? How many Amazon and Google fan forums do you frequent? Both companies have respectable products, but they have as many if not more bugs, glitches, and features announced and under delivered. How's the Google PixelBuds real-time translation feature working out? (it isn't) Or the Google Photo feature announced last year that automatically removes unwanted objects from photos, which never actually came?
If they discontinue support for the Fusion Drive, not if they discontinue Fision Drive.
Time Capsule (the hardware), yes. Time Machine (the software), no, probably not. It remains to be seen what their plans for server-side Time Machine are.
Oh come on. Anybody with any computer should know that the hard drive (of any kind) can die at any time. Some people plan for this, some don't and you see the desperate pleas for help. Nothing callous about advising people to take reasonable care.
Also, just anecdotally I've got a Mac Mini with a fusion drive running for a good 4 years now. Zero issues. I have an iMac with a fusion drive going on 2 years. Zero issues. Let's not manufacture an "issue" out of nowhere.
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? Time Machine is a backup system that can back up to any storage device you connect to your Mac. Why would the EOL of the Time Capsule device spell the end of that?
I can tell you right now what their plan is for the server-side Time Machine. It's iCloud.
Time Capsule was the only way that most Mac laptop users would run backups. Without Time Capsule (or its replacement), the majority of MacBook and MacBook Pro users will just fail to do backups. The percentage of users who will buy a NAS for Time Machine backups is tiny. Unless Apple comes up with a plan for the Time Machine backup device or enable Time Machine backups into iCloud, Time Machine as a technology will die. I don't think Tim Cook is particularly concerned about it, as I doubt he knows what Time Machine is or what purpose Time Capsule served.
The original context was that Fusion Drive "doubles your odds of data loss", and that "It makes no sense in consumer class machines to introduce that risk."
I have asked whether someone can actually support the implication that a hardware failure of one of the two physical disks will cause HFS+ to fail on both disks, and so far, nobody seems to actually address that question head-on.
I'm not the one who did!
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That's plausible, but we're not really seeing it yet. You can neither backup iOS to Time Machine, nor can you backup macOS to iCloud.
Perhaps the hardware product is, but the app itself is still relevant. The app is probably used with third party external hard drives more than it is with Apple's Time Machine device.
Still, it's days are probably numbered. Considering laptops outsell desktops, Apple probably reasons that everyone should use iCloud to perform backups.
You are completely missing the point of a Fusion drive. It is not to add redundancy like a RAID setup. Data loss is no different whether it is on a Fusion drive vs all one drive (SSD/HDD). You need a backup either way. What it does is allow you to pair a small fast SSD with a large HDD and 90% of the time have fast access to what you need. I’m just glad Apple doesn’t lock it down to only stock drives. I could pair my 6TB Gdrive with my 512GB flash drive if I wanted to.
I operate on the theory that any backup is better than no backup. I'm not one of those who say, "Too bad, you should have backed up." Loss of data can be devastating. I'm trying to remind people that having an SSD doesn't protect you from the possibility of data loss.
Since the topic here is APFS on Fusion, I stick to my earlier statement. A backup is essential, regardless of how you store your data. The point I was trying to make was that trying to calculate the odds of failure of a Fusion (or SSD, or plain spinner) is besides the point - the odds of failure don't change the consequences if a failure occurs. People are simply looking at the wrong side of the equation.
If someone wants to reduce the odds of a failure by avoiding specific types of data storage media, fine. It means they may be less likely to need to restore from backup. However, to not backup at all because their storage media is "secure enough?" That's kinda risky.
The kind of backup you may need to make (annual, daily, hourly, instantaneous) is a separate subject, for a separate thread. Some people can afford to lose the past hour's worth of browsing history, others need full-time protection.
Fusion Drive is not two independent volumes. It's one logical volume with two physical drives. If one of the drives fails, the volume will fail. Will you be able to recover information from the intact drive? Yes you will if you hire a data recovery company. However, some files may be half on the HDD and half on the SDD, so chances are that there will be a lot of lost information. You won't be able to get to any of your files without data recovery (either software you buy and run yourself or you hire someone).
Fusion Drive is not an HDD with an SSD cache. If it were, then HDD would store all the data and SSD would have a copy of some of the data. Only files that are being written and being copied from SSD cache to HDD when the SSD drive fails would be corrupted. But, with the Fusion Drive, when the SSD drive fails, your entire volume fails, so without data recovery, you have nothing left.
No disagreement here.
I think you're (unwittingly?) attacking a strawman here. The original assertion was that using Fusion Drive would make failure odds even worse. Nobody is arguing that SSDs, APFS, or any other technology is going to make backups less essential.
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Again, do you have actual data to support that the HFS+ file system fails if one of the two drives fails? Or are you surmising?
I know.
That only proves that, if a physical disk fails, the data stored on that physical disk is lost. The question is whether the data stored on the other physical disk is lost as well.
Fair point. I just hope you can also see that the underlaying issue for all these tedious back-and-forths is the neglect and greed at Apple. Just imagine how awesome Mac could be today, if Apple really cared? Who else could do "Kür" right, do proper innovation, leave a dent in universe, if not the richest tech company on Earth? But no! Max profits above all. How can you justify totally pathetic outdated Mac Mini, the disaster trashcan Mac Pro, abandonment of routers, stagnation of Mac OS, use of outdated components in premium priced products, form-over-function keyboards, never ending delays, extreme bugs, etc. etc.
High sierra does NOT brick a mac, it may take quite a while to recover from a failed install but it does NOT brick it.
The data on the physical drive is not lost, but the volume is lost. You can recover pieces of the files, and in some cases, you may recover complete files. It all depends which drive failed. If the HDD fails, you will lose most of the data, and if SSD fails, you will lose some of the data. By the way, even with failed drives, you can still receiver some or most of the data, but it will cost you a pretty penny. When a drive in my wife's Dell laptop failed in 1999, we hired a data recovery company and paid $1600 to recover the data, and they were able to recover most of it. Of course, the data recovery fee exceed the price of the new laptop, but that's beside the point.
The bottom line here is that in a Fusion drive, if one of the two drives (SSD or HDD) fails, you are screwed. You cannot access that data via regular drive mounting procedures. You have to use specialized tools for the data recovery. I'm not an expert in this, but your partition table is most likely going to be lost, so before you can even access the intact drive, you have to use specialized tools. You can't mount that drive to another macOS system and access the files.
They are to Apple. I usually recommend they be avoided and a SSD upgrade be purchased as a CTO. The stock iMacs have them and they are disappointing when you get exposed to a SSD based Mac.
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I wish you used the proper terms. It's the Time Capsule hardware and Time Machine software. And Time Machine has two parts, the backup process that works hourly and the on demand application for restoring data from your backup device.
When it's not Time Capsule hardware, but a NAS, what do you call it? Not Time Machine server side or Time Machine backend?