'Apple File System' will scale from Apple Watch to Macs, replace HFS+

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 41
    appexappex Posts: 687member
    ZFS?
  • Reply 22 of 41
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    bitmod said:
    looking forward to all our clients wondering why they can't read their usb sticks at home or on older/other systems or pc's add nausea...
    No kidding.  I have to use the primitive MS-DOS FAT on my USB drives in order to share files with Windows machines and play media on my television.  A new, more advanced file system does little good for me.
    *cough*cough*AirPlay*cough*

    Isn't about time we quit using physical media (sneakernet) if the network infrastructure works? The entire reason my dad puts movies on USB sticks to watch on the TV is because the desktop machine doesn't support Miracast, and the "Plex" interface often wants to transcode videos for no reasons.
  • Reply 23 of 41
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    cjcoops said:
    For once, I choose instead to blame Microsoft for not caring at all about Windows’ modernity. It’s their fault. They need something we can write to without a paid utility.  :p

    I agree - I've never seen anyone whine about why Microsoft doesn't support HFS read/write support natively, yet Apple is blamed for Microsoft needing license fees for ntfs ( does Apple require license fees for HFS support say on a Windows computer?).

    OS X can be 'manually' made to enable ntfs write using some Terminal commands, so the system has ntfs write capability built in, but presumably (?) not enabled due to licensing issues.

    Just so anyone else. not aware - either the Tuxera or i think it was some app from Paragon i have used previously, both work perfectly, which means invisibly. Yes, it's a bit of an eye roll that you hav to pay for an app to get this functionality but it's a bargain compared to having to go back to using a Windows machine.
    No the NTFS write comes with the caveat that "this is dangerous, and you are likely to destroy the drive" because it doesn't support the journaling or somesuch.
  • Reply 24 of 41
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    Lots of it sounds ZFS-like; CoreVolume storage management has been around for a while and likely shows how long Apple has been working on this.

    Key question: will it support RAID-5/6 like striping against drive failures and CRC checksums against bitrot? These are the two features that are the most critical to me.

    Snapshots should make TimeMachine several orders of magnitude quicker...
  • Reply 25 of 41
    rezwitsrezwits Posts: 878member
    The file system is the most PRECIOUS part of the OS, it has to be 99.999% bulletproof, even the 0.001% is worrisome. The only thing you(we) hope and pray for is that they spent AS MUCH TIME as they needed, and got everything correct... otherwise if people were to transition to a new file system and there was a few flaws, it would be disastrous, especially at the size of the drives we all deal with. It took nearly 10-15 years for HFS to HFS+ to become 100% reliable...and we have had that fun for about 15 years. Man it's been great. Put it this way, this s#!+ is scary :P
    edited June 2016 ai46
  • Reply 26 of 41
    frantisekfrantisek Posts: 756member
    bdkennedy said:
    This announcement may have livened up the keynote bore-fest.
    I think it is one of most important news out there. But I understand why Apple is more over silent about it. It will take time to fully implement it. It will take center stage in 2017. But I can speculate that watchOS 3 speed improvements can be related also to APFS.
    ai46
  • Reply 27 of 41
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,299member
    rcfa said:
    Lots of it sounds ZFS-like; CoreVolume storage management has been around for a while and likely shows how long Apple has been working on this.

    Key question: will it support RAID-5/6 like striping against drive failures and CRC checksums against bitrot? These are the two features that are the most critical to me.

    Snapshots should make TimeMachine several orders of magnitude quicker...

    Could Apple get a lot of data-protection the features out of system like FoundationDB handling the directory side while Core Storage handles the Volume management?
    That would get two more mature systems to build a complete FS out of. Then version two bring in the "node" syncing of to cluster your devices together.
  • Reply 28 of 41
    jbdragonjbdragon Posts: 2,305member
    mac_128 said:
    This news probably scares me more than anything. I'm still not over MFS to HFS. ;-)

    Glad to see it coming, but yikes. I'm afraid they will push it out faster than it's ready. A file system is the last place I want bugs. There is something to be said for stability in some areas. 
    Which is why I wouldn't use it until 2017 when it's really released. I sure wouldn't use any Beta version on my main computer.
  • Reply 29 of 41
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 465member
    tjwolf said:
    " and filenames are still case-sensitive" - what does that mean???  Of course a file system should be case sensitive.
    Despite the move to a Unix platform with OS X, HFS+ is by default a case insensitive file system (this was considered a feature in the 80's with HFS).    HFS+ can be case sensitive but generally isn't unless the user has a specific need for it.

  • Reply 30 of 41
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 465member
    welshdog said:
    mac_128 said:
    This news probably scares me more than anything. I'm still not over MFS to HFS. ;-)

    Glad to see it coming, but yikes. I'm afraid they will push it out faster than it's ready. A file system is the last place I want bugs. There is something to be said for stability in some areas. 
    I agree, this always makes me nervous. Inevitably there will be people who lose all their data because of some flaw in the new file system or due to their own errors, but yikes that is always super bad publicity.  I hope that something this critical gets special debugging and testing attention inside Apple - more attention than they typically give to the OS or apps.
    It's pretty apparent that APFS will eventually be a trusted, bootable file system used by default on all Apple platforms.  But a new file system is one of those things that is going to be tested pretty heavily on non-boot drives for a while before Apple considers it for Macs, let alone iOS/tvOS devices.  When ZFS was being worked on for Mac OS X back in the 10.7 Lion days, it was a read-only feature that couldn't obviously boot either.  Then Oracle purchased Sun and Apple decided not to keep playing with ZFS.

    ZFS is a great file system and I'm a bit biased since I work for Oracle (but not in development).  But Apple usually only wants to use tech they make themselves if possible.  And I'd speculate that ZFS really wasn't engineered with mobile devices in mind.  It's great for large scale data systems, but I'm sure that APFS has some specific tailoring for mobile devices.

    I don't think we'll see APFS on a shipping product before fall of 2017 (other than basic non-boot compatibility in Sierra and El Cap).
    edited June 2016
  • Reply 31 of 41
    docno42docno42 Posts: 3,755member
    Dominic Giampaolo, one of the original authors of the BeOS file system, has worked at Apple forever.  I wonder how much of a distraction ZFS was and had that whole fiasco not happened would we have had this a long time ago?  We may never know.  At least we are finally seeing fundamental and substantial change for a file system in the Apple universe in a long, long time!
  • Reply 32 of 41
    Eric_WVGGEric_WVGG Posts: 966member
    If anyone would like a review of everything wrong with HFS+ that APFS is potentially going to fix, here's one of Siracusa's classics on the topic: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/
    docno42
  • Reply 33 of 41
    docno42docno42 Posts: 3,755member
    appex said:
    ZFS?
    On a desktop?  Are you nuts? On a mobile device or the Apple Watch?  Are you completely out of your mind?

    ZFS is cool technology, but it's no panacea.  And Oracle screwing up the licensing didn't help.  It looks like Apple lost about three years screwing around with ZFS.  Thanks Larry!  
  • Reply 34 of 41
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    cjcoops said:
    OS X can be 'manually' made to enable ntfs write using some Terminal commands, so the system has ntfs write capability built in, but presumably (?) not enabled due to licensing issues.
    I think it’s also a little unstable, but I’ve never had any problems with it.
  • Reply 35 of 41
    I just watched the WWDC video about APFS. There's a huge feature that wasn't mentioned yesterday, and that's that they are planning to offer live, in-place upgrades from HFS+ to APFS, without requiring a reformat. Holy crap. This is huge and will probably make adoption much higher.

    This new file system is the best announcement they've made in the last 10 years.
    tjwolf said:
    " and filenames are still case-sensitive" - what does that mean???  Of course a file system should be case sensitive.
    HFS/HFS+ (other than a few seldom-used variants) are case insensitive, but case preserving. You can see this by creating a file called "foo", and then trying to make another file called "Foo" in the same folder. It won't work, because the file system considers "foo" and "Foo" to be essentially the same filename.
    cjcoops said:

    I agree - I've never seen anyone whine about why Microsoft doesn't support HFS read/write support natively, yet Apple is blamed for Microsoft needing license fees for ntfs ( does Apple require license fees for HFS support say on a Windows computer?).
    Apple publishes the HFS+ specification right here for anyone to use:

    https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/technotes/tn/tn1150.html

    No mention of a license that I can see. I suspect the main reason Microsoft doesn't support it is because yuck, HFS+.
    rcfa said:
    Lots of it sounds ZFS-like; CoreVolume storage management has been around for a while and likely shows how long Apple has been working on this.

    Key question: will it support RAID-5/6 like striping against drive failures and CRC checksums against bitrot? These are the two features that are the most critical to me.
    That's a good question. The omission of checksumming from the discussions so far does come across as odd.
    Snapshots should make TimeMachine several orders of magnitude quicker...
    That's an understatement. Snapshots should move a typical TM backup from taking ~45 minutes to seconds.
    edited June 2016 docno42
  • Reply 36 of 41
    sevenfeetsevenfeet Posts: 465member
    I just watched the WWDC video about APFS. There's a huge feature that wasn't mentioned yesterday, and that's that they are planning to offer live, in-place upgrades from HFS+ to APFS, without requiring a reformat. Holy crap. This is huge and will probably make adoption much higher.


    Didn't Microsoft do that with FAT32->NTFS?  It's cool, yes and quite useful but I think it's been done before.
  • Reply 37 of 41
    ZFS isn't for your typical user desktop. I don't think people even used it as such, although Ubuntu 16.1 LTS seems to have embraced ZFS on Linux so much so it included it in the Kernel. I use it for servers and its great.
    Actually Sun built some nice desktop features into OpenSolaris and Solaris 11 that relied on ZFS. Most notably "Time Slider", which was basically Time Machine, but built directly into the desktop file manager and using ZFS snapshots, without the need for external storage.
    edited June 2016
  • Reply 38 of 41
    sevenfeet said:
    I just watched the WWDC video about APFS. There's a huge feature that wasn't mentioned yesterday, and that's that they are planning to offer live, in-place upgrades from HFS+ to APFS, without requiring a reformat. Holy crap. This is huge and will probably make adoption much higher.


    Didn't Microsoft do that with FAT32->NTFS?  It's cool, yes and quite useful but I think it's been done before.
    Alsoft did it with HFS->HFS+ too with PlusMaker, back in the day. Doesn't change the fact that this is great.
  • Reply 39 of 41
    cornchipcornchip Posts: 1,945member
    appex said:
    ZFS?
    Read Thread?
  • Reply 40 of 41
    colinngcolinng Posts: 116member
    sevenfeet said:
    tjwolf said:
    " and filenames are still case-sensitive" - what does that mean???  Of course a file system should be case sensitive.
    Despite the move to a Unix platform with OS X, HFS+ is by default a case insensitive file system (this was considered a feature in the 80's with HFS).    HFS+ can be case sensitive but generally isn't unless the user has a specific need for it.


    As stated by CajunLuke on StackExchange:


    HFS is, by default, case-insensitive but case-preserving (i.e. it doesn't care what you type for comparison purposes, but it will remember what you type).

    More details:
    https://support.apple.com/kb/PH8289?locale=en_CA
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