- APFS cannot be used with Time Machine, FileVault encryption, or Fusion drives.
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What does the following APFS statement mean?
- Thread starter blackxacto
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What that means is right now, in the pre-release versions of APFS included in 10.12.x, those things do not work. Filevault becomes unnecessary with APFS as APFS has its own encryption. It remains to be seen whether that functionality appears when APFS becomes the default in macOS. It may be that devices with Fusion Drives will need to continue using the existing HFS+ filesystem. I would imagine that Time Machine will be modified to work in some fashion by the time APFS is the default.
It simply means that those features are not implemented yet. As chrfr correctly notes, Filevault will be unnecessary with APFS. Fusion Drive should work with APFS without any issues (once the support is added). Time Machine will most likely work much better with APFS than it currently works with HFS+, because APFS supports incremental snapshots on filesystem level, where HFS+ has to emulate them with hard links and copies. Practically, this would mean faster and more reliable TM backups. They could even potentially do some interesting meta-level stuff, where they do snapshots on the local disk first, then synchronise the FS tables with the backup destination, resulting in very fast versioned FS mirrors.
AFAIK, the only real "critical" change is the difference in handling Unicode file names. If you have files with weird names then some software that didn't follow best practices might run into issues.
Basically, the apps need to handle unicode themselves. The key here is to handle unicode names in a consistent manner. Devs who use high-level filesystem frameworks are most likely on the safe side. If an app does not care about this at all, you can end up with two files that essentially have the same name. I doubt that this will cause a HUGE mess, but there is a potential for at least SOME mess.
This is a very nice overview of the topic in case you are interested: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/03/24/apfss-bag-of-bytes-filenames/
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No, Apple is mainly delegating this task to storage device firmware. Read the official FAQ: https://developer.apple.com/library...f/doc/uid/TP40016999-CH6-DontLinkElementID_16
App access the drive by way of APIs so at that level nothing will be different and there shouldn't be any issues. Utilities will be the one area that will have issues and require an update to work, since they tend to access the storage device at a lower level.