Well, I may consider going to APFS after a few years. HFS+ is not that bad right now.
Apple, please, DO NOT automatically convert HFS+ partition to APFS. I relies HFS+ to store lots of my critical files.
Time to aggressively delay system upgrade.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
What's New in macOS High Sierra: APFS, Metal 2, Photos Improvements, Safari Autoplay Blocking and More
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Time to aggressively delay system upgrade.
You can read a ZFS developer's view on this, in which he describes APFS's story around user data checksumming as 'highly nuanced' here. My layman's view is that since Apple devices by default ship with ECC or other checksumming protections for the data at the hardware level, it isn't worth the computational and storage costs to checksum them again at the filesystem level.
At the end of the day I don't know if it matters, since it will be a while before any OS has official support for both APFS and ZFS - its not something you can choose between yet. Even then I'd say - for consumer devices, ZFS is overkill - for servers, APFS is insufficient.
Love the APFS. Copying files is literally as fast as Craig demonstrated. I copied a 5gb video file and it was instant.
The only auto conversion confirmed is for SSD system (boot) volumes. Any secondary volumes or external volumes would need to be manually migrated.
Apparently iOS releases were doing test run conversions for APFS, writing the metadata to blank areas of the disk but not overwriting the superblock to make the change take effect. I wouldn't be surprised to find out macOS updates were already converting the system partition to APFS - but then throwing the result away.
Filesystem upgrades sound scarier than they are; the upgrade process is built to write all the new filesystem bits in free space, and changing the superblock 'pointer' at the end to use the new structure. If the filesystem conversion fails, the superblock isn't changed, and the only evidence of the attempt is the bytes written to the unused free space of the drive.
HFS+ to APFS was designed to be a minimal upgrade. No file data gets modified, but the directory structures and metadata (file permissions, etc) will be. Other filesystems may have to change data format, which can result in a lot more free space and time being needed to convert in-place.
The biggest risk during a filesystem upgrade is that the filesystem you are upgrading from is corrupt. Even then, the upgrade will fail rather than sticking you with a bad APFS volume. However, if the disk bookkeeping is corrupt enough, any data writes could have potentially overwritten user data - including the writes APFS makes to 'blank areas' while converting directories and metadata.
For this reason, the two recommendations I have are:
- Keep backing up. If you aren't backing up now, don't wait to start when you upgrade, start now.
- If you are nervous, boot into recovery mode and run a filesystem check before starting the install.
That was exactly my thought when they came out with the name "High Sierra". SL was one of the all-time OS X high points, so here's hoping High Sierra lives up to it!
...why? It isn't intrusive at all. I've never used it on mine and don't even notice it's there.
That's obviously why it was named High Sierra, just as Snow Leopard was simply a refinement of Leopard and didn't bring a huge amount of innovative features. A lot of people on this forum got exactly what they were asking for, refinements and new technologies instead of adding on more features or changing up the GUI. But others still will complain about lack of innovation.
Evidently can't please everyone...
Is anyone actually using AV1 yet? Doesn't seem like a necessary or useful addition at this point. HEVC is actually in use today.
I think the problem is that desktop operating systems are pretty mature. I mean is there really that much more they can add to MacOS after~30 years? Eventually the desktop will become a solved piece of software.
The highly nuanced story is that APFS does checksumming for file system metadata (data about the trees, volumes, etc) but not for user data (you know, the stuff you care about).
There is absolutely no substitute for file system level checksumming. Zero. None. Your layman's perspective is not accurate. Things will fail in unexpected ways, especially hardware. The compute cost of hashing blocks on write and comparing on read is minuscule, absolutely infinitesimal. The only reason APFS does not have user data integrity from day one is an internal decision. An incredibly misguided internal decision.
It's okay for consumer devices to not have data integrity if consumers don't care about their data. I suspect that quite a few consumers do care. For them APFS is insufficient, and that is squarely on Apple.
Apple didn't adopt it because Sun was bought by Oracle. OS X 10.6 Server advertised support for ZFS prior to release and then it just went up in smoke.
It was almost certainly not because of technical issues.
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x-project-over-licensing-issues/
I'm not a filesystem expert but I'm curious if APFS offers advantages over ZFS in on flash storage.
[doublepost=1497677826][/doublepost]
I sold mine under the belief that macOS Sierra would be the last supported OS. I could of gotten an extra year...
Apple supports the two prior versions of the OS currently. This means that even if your machine doesn't get the latest, it's still supported with security patches and the like for years. If 10.13 is the last version, your machine is still supported until 10.16 is released under the current release cycle.
I wish APFS was a good enough replacement for ZFS, and I could go with something more integrated with the system for everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't come close. ZFS is still the best. Here's hoping for future improvements!
EDIT: Well, unless encryption is important enough to you to forego most of the ZFS feature set.
APFS was designed and written ten years later than ZFS. With the feature set of iOS and MacOS users in mind. A very different audience from ZFS. Instead of making some claims without any evidence, please enlighten us and tell us in which ways ZFS is better for MacOS users.
And then there's the little problem that ZFS is a legal nightmare which alone will have kept Apple far away from it.
[doublepost=1497680129][/doublepost]
I'd say there is nothing to worry about because Apple has already upgraded hundreds of millions of iOS devices from HFS+ to APFS without anyone complaining. (On the other hand, yes, something like that, Apple needs to be able to upgrade hard drives that are as close to full as you'd want to be, say 95%, but not drives that are 100% full, so there must be no data duplication, and it must be done in such a way that if you have a power failure 95% through the conversion, everything is safe).
Last edited by a moderator:
This is only my opinion, but I believe you are being incredibly dramatic. The sky has not fallen. Even the largest storage configurations for the vast majority of macOS machines are still fairly small in the grand scheme. If people are keeping their most important data there and not utilizing the iCloud features and/or Time Machine...that's on them for putting all their eggs in one basket. You speak as if you know for a fact that there was no reason for them to omit what you wish they hadn't...when you clearly do not have access to any information to back that claim. Point being...get a grip.
Well, Windows 10 users also can do this, just need a different version.
Which is not available through retail.
Im still suprised apple are so slow to release the ios news app to more countries. Still dont have it in sweden and its been out for years
I agree and with this approach the converter needs very little free space to do the conversion. On top of that until the converter deletes the old file system metadata it can effectively switch back to it at any time, meaning it can wait to delete it when the new file system is already in place and all the required checks are green.
Would never consider Apple's pricey cloud services... they put me right off way back years ago. So no matter what they do to it - movin' on.
ZFS was a path that Apple considered taking until the situation was made problematic by licensing issues. Full feature set of ZFS requires considerable resources - and lots of memory. Obviously things like de-dup features could be turned off and the memory requirements drop considerably. Apple is not currently in the server market, so many of the features of ZFS would be overkill.
HFS+ reached maturity long ago and has been feature complete.
The APFS still has a rather long feature list of stuff to implement, and by the time it is feature complete.... hard drives will likely be less and less of an installed base for this technology. Data integrity is important and having built in smarts to know when data has suffered "bit rot" is valuable -- I have yet to run into this issue on my SSD so I am not sure what form it takes. BUT, both the APFS and the SSD technology are both maturing -- and I am not sure if the data integrity will be more of a hardware feature set or a software feature set once everything has matured. Only time will tell, but things are now moving pretty quickly.
What is sure that for most things APFS is currently better than HFS+ now. The COW file system brings features such as file versioning into the core operating system that allow for built in "Time Machine" type views, and a temporally stable data set so that you can continue to have the drive online while also have a backup of that drive being done and know that things that are being changed are not going to make that backup invalid due to data inconsistency. A backup started at 10:30am will consist of an exact replication of that data ... even though it is continually modified during the backup time period. It is also within the ability to keep the data on one drive in one machine continually in-sync (within minutes at most) of a duplicate drive at an offsite location.
This is a major improvement for all Apple devices -- while at the same time still under development going forward. I am not going to rain on the parade because I am so hard headed that only a specific product (ZFS) will do. I do hope they eventually release it as an open-source Darwin feature.... so that it is possible to write a driver to mount on other OSs.
Aside from baking the compression method specifier into the metadata, the features you've listed are achievable on HFS+ volumes as well. It doesn't sound like they're dependent on file system metadata, but driver or OS utility support. Even transparent file compression could be done on HFS+ (and HFS) volumes by making use of the reserved metadata space.
I just hope APFS still supports multiple file forks and file creator/type. Features that Apple should never have surrendered to the NeXT engineers after the merger.