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Apple File System

developer.apple.com

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Re: Apple File System

#331

Post by mschuster91 »

wstrange wrote: post #247
mschuster91 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being energy hungry relative to UFS and others is likely true due to things like checksum calculations and compression, but there is no way to implement these things without needing more cycles to compute them. Not so true now - people have added encryption and compression instructions to CPUs. I'd be surprised if Apple couldn't ask Intel for a couple opcodes, and with the mobile platforms they do it anyway.

But why couldn't ZFS also take advantage of those opcodes?

Because not every opcode is made public. The "usual suspects" for SIMD and encryption are public, yes, but nothing stops Intel from adding opcodes so highly specialized that they essentially represent the exact program code of the filesystem.

Re: Apple File System

#332

Post by Twisell »

laumars wrote: post #325
Twisell wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 years ago, while being a teenager, I misconfigured CCC only to find out that only the active user folders where synced after a full erase/reinstall upgrade of MacOS. This was my epic "there is to kind of people those who lost data and those who will loose data" story. All my dad and mum files where gone, luckily nothing professional and no pictures (analog camera still ruled back then). This is just a reminder tha…

I appreciate this was a long time ago and you've learned a lot since, but your story perfectly illustrates the importance of not just performing backups, but periodically testing them as well. That way you eliminate your blind faith in a black box by ensuring you actually have a working solution to fallback on.

I my case (and I can't emphasis more on my teenager status back then) it was a permission issue, everything looked fine from my perspective, but CCC somewhat didn't have the right permissions to sync folder of others users. So their home folder where actually empty.

From my perspective the backup was a success... This traumatizing error is when I first learned about superuser and permissions. I guess CCC has gone a long way since then and added more safeguard. But I must confess that I've sticked to a "use the goddam standard tools" since then.

Sure there must be a lot of more customizable or faster tools out there. But Time Machine stay "the backup tool my mum can't use wrong" I can't give enough to credit to Apple for that. And putting aside NSA/FBI problem, iCloud backup for iPhone is exactly as smooth. Literally every time I go to a Genius Bar, someone is about to hug a genius because of a successful restore from the iCloud of their broken/stolen iPhone.

This is how you build a "faithful" customer base and no other tech company understand that better than Apple so far.

Re: Apple File System

#333

Post by cm3 »

gyc wrote: post #310
cm3 wrote: post #254

Does anyone know if Dominic Giampaolo was involved with the design?

He's still at Apple so I would assume he had a major role.

I hope so, though I kinda miss the pervasive use of metadata as in BeFS. That was before its time and such a nice concept. Coupled with saved queries, it's unmatched to this day in mainstream, general purpose file system semantics.

Re: Apple File System

#334

Post by killercup »

astrange wrote: post #236
killercup wrote: post #45

> Flash / SSD Optimization I.e., a "unique copy-on-write design" > Space Sharing Basically, ZFS datasets. > Snapshots If those can be sent: Finally Time Machine done right. > The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted volumes. Interesting. > An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is r…

> Famously missing, but not the hardest thing to add considering all the features above: Compression (which HFS+ supports!) HFS+ supports compression, so compression is not a new feature, so it's not on the New Features page. No problem!

I can live with that! Be sure to make it LZ4!

Re: Apple File System

#336

Post by laumars »

Twisell wrote: post #332
laumars wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this was a long time ago and you've learned a lot since, but your story perfectly illustrates the importance of not just performing backups, but periodically testing them as well. That way you eliminate your blind faith in a black box by ensuring you actually have a working solution to fallback on.

I my case (and I can't emphasis more on my teenager status back then) it was a permission issue, everything looked fine from my perspective, but CCC somewhat didn't have the right permissions to sync folder of others users. So their home folder where actually empty. From my perspective the backup was a success... This traumatizing error is when I first learned about superuser and permissions. I guess CCC has gone a l…

Those points don't change the fact that you (and everyone else) should test back ups periodically.

If it's not file system permissions nor other configuration problems then it will be a failing storage medium or just dumb user error. So the only way to be sure you have a working back up is to test that back up - ideally before you actually need to use it.

Re: Apple File System

#337

Post by catwell »

whorleater wrote: post #66
lewisl9029 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what people were hoping for with ReFS from Microsoft, which released years ago, but that still hasn't happened yet.

Apple is far more willing to switch to more newer technologies than Microsoft is.

Also, NTFS being a much better filesystem than HFS+, there was a lot less incentive to switch.

Re: Apple File System

#338

Post by Alphasite_ »

veidr wrote: post #277
skrause wrote: post #19

No checksumming?

That is insane! I just so strongly assumed that any new advanced filesystem would have checksumming, I read the entire document without realizing it is never mentioned. It would be unbelievable if they really didn't have checksumming. Could it just be that they haven't documented it yet? That seems weird and unlikely, but... not was weird and unlikely as APFS not having checksumming.

It may, or may not, have it but I very much doubt there isn't room to retrofit it where appropriate.

Re: Apple File System

#339

Post by Twisell »

laumars wrote: post #336
Twisell wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I my case (and I can't emphasis more on my teenager status back then) it was a permission issue, everything looked fine from my perspective, but CCC somewhat didn't have the right permissions to sync folder of others users. So their home folder where actually empty. From my perspective the backup was a success... This traumatizing error is when I first learned about superuser and permissions. I guess CCC has gone a l…

Those points don't change the fact that you (and everyone else) should test back ups periodically. If it's not file system permissions nor other configuration problems then it will be a failing storage medium or just dumb user error. So the only way to be sure you have a working back up is to test that back up - ideally before you actually need to use it.

To be clear I can't agree more!

I got a little lost while writing. But indeed my point was double check! Because in my case everything looked fine at first sight.

This is even why I don't use the same process for my two backup (daily/monthly). Because to be fair you can't constantly check that your daily/hourly backup isn't corrupted, you rely on its build-in safeguard and occasionally you check it.

But by using two different methods for daily vs monthly(offsite) backup, you significantly reduce the odds that the two different methods failed at the same time while you need them. (Also a monthly full clone is way easy to check than a Time Machine Disk)

Re: Apple File System

#340

Post by simonh »

orionblastar wrote: post #307
dcosson wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to troll, but I see so many HN comments about backups and I just don't have this need anymore. What are people using traditional backup software like time machine, carbon copy cloner, etc. for on their laptop these days? I use google docs for all my docs and spreadsheets, occasionally I use excel or word or keynote for files but if I do I save the docs to my dropbox or google drive folder, I have my photos…

I agree cloud based backups like Dropbox just sync in the background. Got any souce code store it in Github or Bitbucket. Documents and source code doesn't take up much space. Unless you want music and video files which iTunes can always sync for you to your Apple mobile device. I use a USB hard drive to back up my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles. Also my downloads and other stuff too big for Dropbox. $100 for a 4T…

Sync is not backup. If you corrupt or delete a file, the destructive action will get propagated as well. Time machine and many other backup systems gives you access to previous versions of files and folders.
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