Anyone using the APFS file system ?

[James]

Well with only 3 days left before my new iMac gets here I got to thinking today might this be a good time to give Apples new APFS file system a look and maybe start using it in the new iMac. Anyone using this new file system ? and if so what do you think of it ? Is it worth the effort to switch over ? Any downsides that might make me say no ? What you say guys...

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Anyone who upgraded to High Sierra is automatically using APFS on their SSDs. Anyone who has upgraded to Mojave is using it on their HDD and Fusion Drives. So in short, virtually all of us are using it. There is absolutely no discernible difference that any end user would see.

 

[IWT]

Hi James.

I've had no problems with APFS. I doubt you will.

One thing I should remark upon is that, for the time being, your Time Machine backup EHD should remain formatted Mac OS X (Extended) Journaled AKA HFS+. This is important.

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/deep-dive/time-machine-and-apfs-need-know/

If you use a cloning backup, and I hope you do, then you might want to read these:

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/leveraging-snapshots-on-apfs-volumes
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/everything-you-need-know-about-carbon-copy-cloner-and-apfs

By common consent, APFS is faster and slicker and, like it or not, is the way forward.

Ian

 

[harryb2448]

You will have no option as it will come with Mojave and APFS.

 

[Slydude]

At some point during the High Sierra beats I tried the APFS file system. This was before Apple decided that APFS would not be supported on fusion drives. For me APFS made a decent improvement in speed which was noticeable when either copying a large number of files/folders or copying a few large files. Kind of a moot point now that APFS is supported fully. Just keep Ian's suggestions in mind.

 

[James]

That sounds good Sly, thanks guys for the info. This will be the first time I have really had any dealings with the new file system as my desktop is still on El Capitan and I have only had the MacBook Pro for a short time with Mojave on it and to be honest I hadn't run disk utility on it yet to see that it does indeed have the APFS file system on it. Isn't tech amazing yesterday I couldn't even spell APFS, today I am one ;D

 

[MacInWin]

The biggest difference you will see in APFS is in Disk Utility, where instead of drives/partitions there are containers and volumes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

also at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

 

[James]

The biggest difference you will see in APFS is in Disk Utility, where instead of drives/partitions there are containers and volumes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

also at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

That's the kind of stuff I need to know because I want to separate my boot section from the rest of the stuff and maybe do some resizing also.

 

[harryb2448]

Hey Sly.

STAND BLOODY STILL MAN!!!!!!

 

[pm-r]

Hey Sly.

STAND BLOODY STILL MAN!!!!!!

+1!!!!

At least Mickey isn't whistling as well, but gheese, that must be some fast music he's tapping to. Some fast hillbilly fiddling no doubt???





- Patrick
======

 

[James]

Old Sly down there in Cajun country is probably got some good Zydeco music going and no one can hold still when that gets up to speed...

 

[pm-r]

Old Sly down there in Cajun country is probably got some good Zydeco music going and no one can hold still when that gets up to speed...

Thanks for the heads up on the Zydeco music, and I will admit I had to go Googling to find out what it was all about. But it seems ol' Sly has now slowed down and retired as a Coke-glasses wearing Mr. Magoo type professor.





- Patrick
======

 

[Slydude]

Old Sly down there in Cajun country is probably got some good Zydeco music going and no one can hold still when that gets up to speed...

You're right James. Hard to keep still when that stuff gets goinng. Got a fewe tracks in my iTunes library but don't have any playing at the moment. Getting ready for the Cowboys vs. Saints game.

@Patrick Had to slow things down a bit. Some of the membership was not quite ready for high energy just yet. lol

 

[pm-r]

@Sly

@Patrick Had to slow things down a bit. Some of the membership was not quite ready for high energy just yet. lol

Right Sly, one has to be careful these days especially when it's not known if the person is on Geritol or drugs or something else or just having some sort of seizure. ;D


PS: I didn't realize it was the escaping Nova Scotians (Acadians) that were responsible for bringing that Zydeco type music down to your region until I read about it today, and now I'm wondering why they headed so far south to end up in your Louisiana area. I guess they figured that would be far enough to escape from the British.





- Patrick
======

 

[Slydude]

Looks like that worked out well all alround. If the British had found them the large number of gators and large mosquitos would have made a great natural defense.

Landing in Louisiana makes a degree of sense given that during much of the state's early history we we a French territory/colony. What's harder to figure out are the few brave souls who missed Louisiana entirely and ended up on the Texas gulf coast somewhere.

 

[chscag]

Well, considering that Louisiana is the only state that has Parishes instead of counties, French succession law of inheritance as applied to families, and the best Fried Catfish and Hush Puppies in all of the USA!

And we have Andy Jackson to thank for beating the bloody British at the battle of New Orleans. LOL

 

[pm-r]

Landing in Louisiana makes a degree of sense given that during much of the state's early history we we a French territory/colony.

Interesting, and unfortunately my knowledge of US-Canada history is quite lacking, and I sure didn't know that.

I guess they just messaged each other and decided Louisiana would be a good place to escape to. But it seems that not all managed to remember to take their "Squeezeboxes" with them.

What's harder to figure out are the few brave souls who missed Louisiana entirely and ended up on the Texas gulf coast somewhere.

What's amazing to me is how they all managed to arrive in a relatively small area in the Louisiana area, I'm led to believe from what I've read, when they didn't even have any GPS, decent accurate Maps, reliable road or trail signs or means of communication. That's quite a long journey.





- Patrick
======

 

[James]

OK, have run into my first snag with the new iMac. Actually it isn't an iMac problem but a problem with the APFS file system. Doesn't seem to be much in the way of manuals or how to's or I just keep looking in the wrong place and not asking the correct question. Anyhow here is what happened and the problem I have. Hopefully someone out there will know the answer.

I have a 4T USB external drive that I hooked up to the iMac and set it up In 4 1T drives, then made 3 of the 4 APFS drives and 1 as regular old format. I then transferred my files into 2 of the drives and everything worked just fine. So I started transferring the files into the third drive and just after the transfer started Mother Nature decided to get into the act and zapped a local power line, which of course cut power off to the computer I was transferring from. The iMac was hooked to a battery backup and didn't go off but after it quit I find that out of aprox 44,000 files it only got about 25-30 thousand. That got fixed by having disk utility erase the drive and doing the files again. BUT !!

The problem I am left with is an extra icon of my Macintosh HD that only shows one file in it which shows an icon that says containertoinvert ...I can find nothing to get rid of it...what is invert ? how do I get rid of this extra icon ? Ideas ?

 

[MacInWin]

Ok, maybe you need to read this: https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/partition-a-physical-disk-dskutl14027/mac and https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/partition-a-physical-disk-dskutl14027/mac and some of the links from inside those articles. Your terminology would seem to indicate that you have four old-style partitions, three of them set up as APFS with a Container and a Volume for that partition, and one set up for HFS+. And now you have on your internal drive a second Volume named "containeroinvert" with one file? Or is it a second "Macintosh HD" with one file of that name? In any case, I would open Disk Utility and see if your internal drive has more than one Volume in the Container, then look at the external drive to see if the partitions each have one Container and one Volume to see if that duplicate Volume is there. If so, follow the instructions from Apple in the articles and linked articles to eliminate the extraneous Volume.

BTW, your division of the drive was not really needed. It would have been easier to have just two partitions with one Container and three Volumes on one partition, then the other partition as HFS+. But in fact, you don't even need the HFS+ on the external unless you want to somehow share the drive physically with another Mac with an older version of the OS. The advantage of APFS and the Container/Volume structure is that volumes are dynamically sized within the Container, so the three drives would size themselves within the Container as they needed to as you added/removed files from the Volume.

APFS is new, and I'm kind of surprised that you could have four partitions, if in fact that is what you have. From reading about it, I would have suspected that converting the drive to APFS would have affected the entire drive and created four Volumes in one Container, but to be honest, I've not played with it enough to know what options exist. I may have to do some experimenting.

 

[IWT]

@James

I can't match Jake's excellent summary, but one thing that is important: if you plan a Time Machine backup, the destination Drive MUST be formatted HFS+ - aka OS X Extended (Journaled).

Ian

EDIT: just realised I said this already in post #3.