There needs to be a clear explanation of how APFS works in relationship to Time Machine backups. I've read the bulk of this thread and still am not sure if an SSD boot drive using APFS could actually be backed up to a mechanical HDD through Time Machine. I really hope they're not expecting people to constantly clone the drive to another SSD in order to do a backup, regardless of how much faster it is with APFS.
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New Apple File System Coming in macOS High Sierra Won't Work With Fusion Drives
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I didn't say everyone, I just said 99% don't. But then again it's like when the poll people as to whether or not they donate to charity... 75% say they do, but fact says only 10% do. LOL.
I'm in the same boat but not sure about this. It keeps talking about "built in" drives, which suggests only macs that came with an SSD out of the box are getting the upgrade.
Ah, typical Macrumors uses, get upset over something you really don't understand. A new file system is HARD to create let alone implement. In addition, fusion drives use Apple's core storage API to make them work - an API that doesn't exist under APFS (for a number of reasons). While extensive testing has been done, you don't want to mess around when it comes to a file system. Even a small bug could have catastrophic effects (I.e. Data loss). Add on to this that APFS was specifically designed with SSDs in mind, Apple is making not only the right move, but the SMART move in limiting APFS to flash storage AT THE MOMENT. I can pretty much guarantee that by .1 or .2 APFS will work with Fusion drives.
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As long as the drive is an SSD it will automatically upgrade to APFS - regardless of whether it is 1st or 3rd party.
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As long as the drive is an SSD it will automatically upgrade to APFS - regardless of whether it is 1st or 3rd party.
I'm not a techie so I may not be very accurate. Your file system shouldn't affect your time machine backup. How a filesystem works is that it determines how your data is stored, where it's stored, and how it can be recalled. I think back in the CD-ROM days, for example, the index for all the files is stored right at the beginning so a CD reader will knkow at what part of a CD to play the 9th song on the playlist for example.
EDIT: you can write files to other standards to years now. I doubt that'll change. Apple just needs to know how to read from the first drive and how to write to the second drive.
Yes, an APFS formatted SSD will backup just fine to an HFS+ spinning disk drive. In fact, at the moment, Time Machine still requires the file system (on the backup drive) to be HFS+. This is most likely due to the drastic changes in how APFS handles "clone" files vs HFS+. In HFS+, the system uses what is called hardlinks - basically two instances of a file pointing back to the same physical file on the drive. Time Machine uses this extensively in order to create incremental backups that include all the data of a previous backup without duplicating said data. APFS does not use hardlinks - doesn't even support the types of hardlinks HFS+ uses. As such, converting a time machine backup to APFS is not a simple proposition. I imagine this will change going forward as APFS matures - but as I stated before, you don't mess around when it comes to a file system. With that being said, APFS has drastically changed how local Time Machine backups (backups saved on the internal drive) are created and stored - using APFS' snapshot feature you can easily restore a system to a previous period of time, and with the way snapshots work this take up very little room on the internal drive.
External drives aren't automatically updated to APFS, but can be easily updated using disk utility. An external RAID array can be updated to APFS as well (did so on my 4 bay TerraMaster in RAID 5). With a hardware RAID, like what I have, the OS doesn't see each individual drive, just one large drive - the RAID controller does the heavy lifting and it could care less what the file system is. Now I can't speak of Apple's software RAID, as I haven't messed around with that yet. I would hold off at the moment though, just to play it safe.
Yeah right.... I'll believe that when I see it.
So long as conventional drives continue to outpace in terms of storage capability (8TB+ and rising) and price (for next to nothing <$200 for 8TB!), there will be a place and a NEED for conventional rotational drives on Macs. All media servers that aren't owned by rich people will need conventional drives for storage. I've got over 10TB here for my whole house media server run on a Mac Mini Server Quad-I7 and there's simply no way I could do that with a SSD.
Frankly, I think this new file system is very poorly designed in that it cannot simply automatically adapt for the type of drive you're using with it. There should be no need to have more than ONE type of file system in the future. Having separate systems for solid state and rotational is STUPID. Like only APPLE since Steve Jobs died STUPID. Like only a moron like Jony Ive would think of something that stupid. Don't license ZFS. Create a new file system that only works with one type of drive and make it the new standard....BRILLIANT Apple! Just Brilliant!
There should be One OS & One File System. Apple fracked it all up again.
Let's continue to have iOS and macOS and tvOS and toiletOS and have them all not work together properly or independently (5th Gen AppleTV STILL dependent on you having iTunes running on a Mac or PC somewhere in the house for local content???? WTF is wrong with Apple???)
You may have missed my previous answer. There are lots of posts in here...
This is a non-issue for now. You can backup an APFS drive to a Time Machine Drive formatted in HFS+. That’s what I’ve been doing since starting the beta, and I’ve done two erase/restores from that backup since starting the beta (including the recent roll-back of my Fusion to HFS+).
Apple has not yet released an APFS version of Time Machine. That’ll be an interesting beta when it happens.
Question... I have an iMac 21.5" 2010 with a traditional mechanical hard drive. I also have a Western Digital mechanical backup drive.
Will I have issues upgrading to High Sierra?
Apple promised nothing when introducing APFS as part of macOS High Sierra.
Almost all software they announce comes with “Features subject to change” in the fine print. Much like iMessages in iCloud, they felt that it was better to pull the feature before the final release and ship it later, as embarrassing as it is, rather than ship a feature that remains buggy as of the final beta of macOS High Sierra. And I’m speaking from experience because I’ve run into very serious issues with APFS on my iMac with a Fusion Drive in using the High Sierra betas.
Are you suggesting that you’d rather Apple ship a filesystem—where it’s incredibly critical that it works properly virtually all the time, for obvious reasons—on hardware where they know it has serious flaws, risking data loss for the public at large?
Developing a filesystem is immensely complex—especially when designing it for upgrading in place without losing data—and I guarantee that your armchair quarterbacking self wouldn’t know the half of it. I bet you think that Apple has only worked on this in the past year or two, when in reality (if I recall correctly), we’ve been hearing about an Apple-designed filesystem for about a decade.
Indeed, I expect my iMac to receive macOS updates for years to come, likely including one with APFS support for Fusion Drives at some point in the next year or maybe two. Again, every announcement comes with a “subject to change” remark in the fine print because not everything can be made completely ready in the betas. And that’s fine with me! When it comes to something as serious as the risk of data loss—which I’ve come close to multiple times in using APFS on a Fusion Drive already—I’d much rather they take their time before exposing it to a very nonzero segment of the public than rush it out because some MacRumors commenter said so.
APFS has been in the works since quite some time before Steve died.
Nope, your drives just won't be automatically updated to APFS. I think you can restart from the recovery partition and upgrade your internal server to APFS from disk utility. If your WD backup is a time maybe backup, DO NOT upgrade it to APFS. Time Machine still needs to be HFS+ formatted (it will backup an APFS volume just fine).
Yeah right.... I'll believe that when I see it.
So long as conventional drives continue to outpace in terms of storage capability (8TB+ and rising) and price (for next to nothing <$200 for 8TB!), there will be a place and a NEED for conventional rotational drives on Macs. All media servers that aren't owned by rich people will need conventional drives for storage. I've got over 10TB here for my whole house media server run on a Mac Mini Server Quad-I7 and there's simply no way I could do that with a SSD.
Frankly, I think this new file system is very poorly designed in that it cannot simply automatically adapt for the type of drive you're using with it. There should be no need to have more than ONE type of file system in the future. Having separate systems for solid state and rotational is STUPID. Like only APPLE since Steve Jobs died STUPID. Like only a moron like Jony Ive would think of something that stupid. Don't license ZFS. Create a new file system that only works with one type of drive and make it the new standard....BRILLIANT Apple! Just Brilliant!
There should be One OS & One File System. Apple fracked it all up again.
Let's continue to have iOS and macOS and tvOS and toiletOS and have them all not work together properly or independently (5th Gen AppleTV STILL dependent on you having iTunes running on a Mac or PC somewhere in the house for local content???? WTF is wrong with Apple???)
The ways in which this post could be more wrong are few and slim.
Yeah right.... I'll believe that when I see it.
So long as conventional drives continue to outpace in terms of storage capability (8TB+ and rising) and price (for next to nothing <$200 for 8TB!), there will be a place and a NEED for conventional rotational drives on Macs. All media servers that aren't owned by rich people will need conventional drives for storage. I've got over 10TB here for my whole house media server run on a Mac Mini Server Quad-I7 and there's simply no way I could do that with a SSD.
Frankly, I think this new file system is very poorly designed in that it cannot simply automatically adapt for the type of drive you're using with it. There should be no need to have more than ONE type of file system in the future. Having separate systems for solid state and rotational is STUPID. Like only APPLE since Steve Jobs died STUPID. Like only a moron like Jony Ive would think of something that stupid. Don't license ZFS. Create a new file system that only works with one type of drive and make it the new standard....BRILLIANT Apple! Just Brilliant!
There should be One OS & One File System. Apple fracked it all up again.
Let's continue to have iOS and macOS and tvOS and toiletOS and have them all not work together properly or independently (5th Gen AppleTV STILL dependent on you having iTunes running on a Mac or PC somewhere in the house for local content???? WTF is wrong with Apple???)
Um, APFS works just fine on a standard spinning dish hard drive. There won't be two file systems going forward, just APFS - which functions the same on an HDD as it does in an SSD.
The only issue at the moment is with fusion drives - which will be resolved going forward. Fusion drives function quite differently from either a standalone SSD or HDD, and this APFS requires a bit more fine tuning until Apple feels confident enough that you can upgrade a fusion drive without losing data.
Your entire party is alarmist and shows a disturbing amount of ignorance.
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By splitting it, you no longer have a fusion drive. The whole point of the fusion drive is that it literally takes a physical HDD and a physical SSD and marries then together, using core storage, to create one virtual volume. APFS does not support (not does it need to) core storage.
This wouldn't be an issue if Apple reduced their SSD prices so we didn't need a fusion drive.
First off, the install does automatically adapt for the drive type. That’s exactly what happened when I installed the first public beta to my Fusion Drive. The problem is that the beta uncovered the need to further debug APFS on Fusion. So after the first couple of betas they automatically stopped converting Fusion Drives to APFS.Frankly, I think this new file system is very poorly designed in that it cannot simply automatically adapt for the type of drive you're using with it. There should be no need to have more than ONE type of file system in the future. Having separate systems for solid state and rotational is STUPID. Like only APPLE since Steve Jobs died STUPID. Like only a moron like Jony Ive would think of something that stupid. Don't license ZFS. Create a new file system that only works with one type of drive and make it the new standard....BRILLIANT Apple! Just Brilliant!
There should be One OS & One File System. Apple fracked it all up again.
Let's continue to have iOS and macOS and tvOS and toiletOS and have them all not work together properly or independently (5th Gen AppleTV STILL dependent on you having iTunes running on a Mac or PC somewhere in the house for local content???? WTF is wrong with Apple???)
There will be one file system. That’s the point of this whole exercise - a new, Flash-optimized file system for iOS, Mac, tvOS, and watchOS. We’re in a transition period. People using older OSes will have HFS+, people who upgrade will be on APFS. If you need to format a drive you will still have a choice of file systems, as has always been the case. Need to format to FAT for Windows compatibility? It’s in there.
However, why is a single OS such a brilliant idea? Ask Microsoft how that worked out. Why load a PC’s worth of OS code on an iPhone, when that iPhone doesn’t support mice, trackpads, external displays, hard drives... don’t confuse a Mac user’s desire to have an iPhone that does everything a Mac can with a good idea. And it makes even less sense for a Watch, Apple TV, or Home Pod.
You may as well insist that every motor vehicle from a motorcycle to earth moving equipment uses the same size oil filter.
Meantime, you ignore the fact that every one of those Apple OSes is built atop BSD Unix - common core, customized implementations.
Let me pull up the part of my statement that matters
I stand by it because all I see is crappy Siri along with new emoji's for iMessage along with their not so clear what's stored in the iCloud Sierra. Yeah with upgrading to High Sierra from what I'm running, El Capitan, I'd see Metal 2 and APFS as major things, but there really aren't that many legit major features outside of those. The rest is what is "mostly fluff". Diminishing return really.