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macOS High Sierra APFS only support SSDs

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That's him wading through the Houston floods.
 
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Careful Patrick, people in glass (White) houses...:Mischievous:



I'm just one of those peaceful, peacekeeping Canadian (English) Canucks types…




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That's him wading through the Houston floods.



I don't think so, unless the photo was taken with receding water levels, as the shoreline is visible behind him…


Now back to your normal programming…



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krs


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Back to Apple's release note: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018

It says "flash storage devices" will be automatically converted to APFS when running High Sierra, ie not just Solid State Drives.

So what happens if I connect a USB flash drive to my Mac with an SSD and running HS, does the USB flash drive then get automatically converted to APSF and can thus not be read by any Mac prior to HS?
Per the note:
For example, a USB storage device formatted as APFS can be read by a Mac using High Sierra, but not by a Mac using Sierra or earlier.

That can't possibly be true.....'
I would hope that a USB Flash Drive (or any external flash storage device, including SSD's that are not clones) does not automatically get converted to APFS.
 

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I will try it here and see what happens.
 
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That can't possibly be true.....'
I would hope that a USB Flash Drive (or any external flash storage device, including SSD's that are not clones) does not automatically get converted to APFS.


You never know!!!

Give it a try and let us know what happens. You should have some spare USB Flash Drives Sitting around you can test it with. :Smirk:





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I have Mojave and High Sierra with SSDs, both formatted APFS and none of the thumb drives I have used in them have been formatted to APFS. What Apple is referencing is internal drives and maybe an extern SSD drive, but not thumb drives. One of the thumb drives I tried was 256GB, so it's not based on size, either.

EDIT: The only external drive I have that is formatted APFS is a Carbon Copy Clone target drive, and that was done by CCC.
 

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It cannot be an "automatic" conversion to APFS in the normal usage of a USB stick. If you are solely talking about a USB OS Installer, that is a different matter.

I use USB sticks on a near daily basis for all the lectures I give. The USB sticks are formatted by me as exFAT on my Mac (HS) so that they are capable of being read by a PC which is the dominant computer in Universities and lecture theatres, hospitals etc.

I have also used, rarely I admit, USB Sticks formatted by me as exFAT to transfer data from one Mac to another; each running a different OS (including HS and Mojave). No problems copying or passing on data from one to another.

Ian
 

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It cannot be an "automatic" conversion to APFS in the normal usage of a USB stick. If you are solely talking about a USB OS Installer, that is a different matter.
Even a USB OS Installer should not be APFS since it can be used (or should be able to be used) to install HS on a Mac with a rotary hard drive.
And I assume an external drive, even if SSD, would not be converted to APFS automatically or we would have heard screams from the Mac community long ago.

This leaves the only potential "incompatibility" in my mind if you have an HS clone on an SSD external that would use APFS and if you then try to use that to clone back to a Mac with a rotary internal drive formatted the old way.
 
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Even a USB OS Installer should not be APFS since it can be used (or should be able to be used) to install HS on a Mac with a rotary hard drive.
I'm not sure that is correct. Assuming a bootable installer is formatted APFS, it can still read/write HFS+, so if you used an APFS-formatted bootable installer on a Mac with a spinner drive, no matter the format of the spinner, it could install. HS left spinners at HFS+, so no issue there. Even Mojave has the ability to read/write/partition/format HFS+ drives, even though Mojave converts internal spinners to APFS along with SSDs.

This leaves the only potential "incompatibility" in my mind if you have an HS clone on an SSD external that would use APFS and if you then try to use that to clone back to a Mac with a rotary internal drive formatted the old way.
Depends on the clone process. CCC uses file-by-file cloning as default, which means that if you clone an APFS drive to an HFS+ drive, the HFS+ drive is left HFS+ and just the files are moved. And since HS can use both APFS and HFS+, there shouldn't be any issue with that clone. Now, if you changed from file clone to sector-by-sector clone there would be an issue as the sector structure is different between APFS and HFS+, but that low-level clone is not the typical process used by most people who clone drives. But an APFS external running High Sierra cloned to an HFS+ spinner with file clone process should work. Not Mojave, but HS.
 

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I'm not sure that is correct. Assuming a bootable installer is formatted APFS, it can still read/write HFS+, so if you used an APFS-formatted bootable installer on a Mac with a spinner drive, no matter the format of the spinner, it could install. HS left spinners at HFS+, so no issue there. Even Mojave has the ability to read/write/partition/format HFS+ drives, even though Mojave converts internal spinners to APFS along with SSDs.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but what do you think this means in the Apple release note?
For example, a USB storage device formatted as APFS can be read by a Mac using High Sierra, but not by a Mac using Sierra or earlier.
If I have a Mac with spinners running Sierra and I want to use my APFS formatted USB installer to install HS on that Mac, doesn't the statement in the Apple note say that cannot be done?

Depends on the clone process. CCC uses file-by-file cloning as default, which means that if you clone an APFS drive to an HFS+ drive, the HFS+ drive is left HFS+ and just the files are moved. And since HS can use both APFS and HFS+, there shouldn't be any issue with that clone. Now, if you changed from file clone to sector-by-sector clone there would be an issue as the sector structure is different between APFS and HFS+, but that low-level clone is not the typical process used by most people who clone drives. But an APFS external running High Sierra cloned to an HFS+ spinner with file clone process should work. Not Mojave, but HS.

Would be great if anyone can actually verify that.
 
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krs, that means exactly what it says. "Using" is the key word. At boot time, the system is not "using" anything. It gets all the boot information from the boot loader that is part of the initialization process. So when you boot from an external by holding down the appropriate keys, the boot loader goes looking to the appropriate place for booting information. Some of that booting information is how to access the data on the boot drive to complete the boot process. So, as I said, if you have a bootable installer formatted APFS, the boot loader gets APFS access information from the drive, accesses the rest of the data and boots. Now you are "using" HS or Mojave, both of which can read/write/partition/format both HFS+ and APFS formats to drives. At this point the internal drive is NOT the boot drive, so it can be formatted in any way you please, and any system you want can be installed on it.

As for verification of the rest, will the developer website be sufficient for you? https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/everyth...y-cloner-and-apfs#hdd_to_ssd_clone_conversion
 
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Also, Bombich (the developer of Carbon Copy Cloner) dropped what he termed "block" copy a few versions ago as it was not as reliable as a clone process as the file copy is. Right now, I don't know of any cloner that can do block or sector copies on the Mac. There are several for Windows that can do that, and it is routinely performed that way at data rescue service companies. I have not used any of the data rescue applications in a while, so they may do block/sector clones. I seem to recall that Data Rescue 3, the last version I used, offered that kind of clone process. But as I said, it's been a while and they have moved on to many releases since I last used it.
 

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Just as a matter of interest have you ever looked at ChronoSync?


Sent from my iPhone
 

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I only ask because it is quite different in many respects to SD and CCC which we all seem to like. Admittedly it's probably more business oriented but it could well suit some people's needs for just that reason. It's the same price as CCC too. http://m.econtechnologies.com/chronosync.html


Sent from my iPhone
 
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I do have ChronoSync, used it to synchronize the email between two machines. The machines separated in version of macOS (one was vintage, couldn't upgrade) so the sync got a bit funky and we stopped it. I still have the license. It worked very well when we did use it and has a lot going for it. It would make a good backup clone system.
 

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Great, I was beginning to think no one had heard of it, much less tried it. I became aware of it a few years back and immediately saw its potential for business owners who had both home and work devices. This is not a need for me with just the one primary computer. So thanks for the feedback.


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Rod, it would be fantastic for a business traveler who had a portable for being on the road and then wanted the work from that trip to be moved to an office machine. It is very flexible and as I said, worked well for us.
 

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