Now, if only Apple would ship a new Mac Pro to put APFS on next year. At this point, information is just dribbling out, but what we know so far has been cause for much joy. We’ll be hearing much more about it over the coming years. Eventually, the spinning beachball may become as rare as a Corvette owner without a baseball cap.ĪPFS has a long and glorious future ahead of it. Operations that are exposed to the user are given priority. Also, there is a focus on reducing I/O latency. The special characteristics of Flash data managers, called the Flash Translation Layer (FTL), are taken into account. APFS has been optimized for overall performance especially with SSDs. APFS will support this, and with that special hardware in future Macs, we can also sell our Macs with confidence knowing that all our private data is unrecoverable from SSD/Flash storage.ħ. After you do a reset of the iPhone, that key is destroyed and all that remains is an unreadable, encrypted jumble in Flash storage. That’s a protected part of memory that holds the hardware encryption key. The reason you can take an iPhone into an Apple store and recycle it with confidence has to do with special hardware: effaceable memory. And so, it may be that Apple’s decision about checksums lies with how it devises a Time Machine replacement.Ħ. Data that’s important will get saved to two or more separate drives. If the user backs up data by saving copies on the same drive, that really isn’t a backup. There is also a philosophical issue here. However, APFS has the facility to implement user data checksums at some future point if called for. The discussion continues with Apple currently claiming that their standards for the hardware they ship is so high, it isn’t a problem.Īlso, because of the way APFS duplicates data, making copies of files won’t stave off possible corruption. The argument is that checksumming all the user data consumes added power and has A (small) space penalty. Right now, APFS plans to checksum only its own data not the user data. Checksums are used to detect and correct errors (corruption, “bit rot”) of data. Perhaps the biggest controversy about APFS I’ve seen is the business of checksums. Just how we’ll move forward on these two seemingly contradictory fronts isn’t yet clear.ĥ. It’s quite another to return the whole file system to a previous state. It’s one thing to go back in time and retrieve a single file that was deleted months ago. We have two notions that seem incompatible. This, combined with the fact that APFS doesn’t currently support the hard links that Time Machine uses suggests that a different mechanism will have to be invoked if Time Machine, or something akin to it, is to endure. The state of the file system can be periodically saved and reverted to that identical state at a later time. But then, ambitious goals tend to get products out on time rather than suffering endless delays.Ĥ. Given that Apple has been working on APFS for two years, the goal of having it ready in 2017 is very ambitious. At that point, the file system is reliable, but may still be tweaked. It takes about four years to design, from scratch, and ship a new file system. Ultimately, the decision was made to design a new file system that recognizes the scale of Apple’s products, from Apple Watch to Mac Pro.ģ. It’s typical for Apple to have this kind of debate internally. We’ve learned that Apple debated internally about adopting a currently available, modern file system like ZFS or rolling its own. Apple engineers could only smile and get back to work.Ģ. We learned that Apple has been working on APFS since 2014, and that was well before Linus Torvalds made his very public, stinging remarks about HFS+. Likely the reason Apple didn’t go with the name AFS is because that’s been in use for a long time by Andrew File System. It lifted the spirits of all those who were grumbling about the technical inadequacies of HFS+, the absence of security and encryption as a first-class citizen, the coarsness of its time stamps, and the overly strained mechanism behind Time Machine, just to name a few things.īefore I go on, for an introduction to what a file system is and why Apple wanted to replace its aging HFS+, see: “ Details Emerge on Apple’s New File System APFS – What Does it All Mean?”ġ. To hear that Apple has finally decided to do something about its obsolete file system, HFS+, warms the heart. Here are some of the notable things we’ve learned since the first day of WWDC along with some context. It’s been a hot topic of discussion over the last week. But Apple’s has been developing a new file system for all its devices called Apple File System.
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