Should have paid Oracle and just put ZFS on OS X.
MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
31–40 of 193 posts
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#32Can you even test a filesystem properly internally?
Seems to me we're all involved in a massive public beta.
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use a sparse bundle disk image, i.e. a disk image with variable size and consisting of multiple files under the hood, because it is more efficient to back up over a network. Instead of uploading a 50 GB file to a cloud storage on every backup, only a fraction of data has to be uploaded (the sparse bundle’s changed files) which makes backing up the 50 GB file very fast if only a few megabytes were added. If anyone i…
Wait, why would the 50 GB need to be transferred fully every time if it was a fixed size image?
The very first backup of a fixed size image will be the full size of the image, e.g. 50 GB, no matter which backup software you use. Even if inside the image no files exist. The very first backup of a sparse bundle disk image will be ~100 MB (the initial size of that image).
On repeated backups, some backup softwares operate on file level and upload the whole file if it changed. So if you have a fixed size 50 GB image, mount it, add a file, unmount it, it changed, and the whole 50 GB image file has to be uploaded (with some backup softwares).
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#34Not to downplay the importance of this, but it reads as clickbait that you wait until the second paragraph to say "oh yeah, it's only sparsebundles. Just those things that almost nobody uses."
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#35I upgraded my hackintosh to High Sierra with APFS. The next day, I accidentally switched off the machine while it was in the _process_ of shutting down (the screen had gone blank, but casing still emitting lights). Next time I turned it on, I couldn't get past login screen (giving me forever beach ball). I put the ssd inside my old MBP as slave to recover data. The ssd was corrupted, most data gone, as in shown in Fi…
...So not an actual Apple Product.
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#36High Sierra seems like a real gem.
Honestly, it's the first Mac OS release I'd actively recommend avoiding upgrading to. It offers essentially no benefits over the prior release, and a whole lot of downsides. (Security issues notwithstanding, High Sierra also drops compatibility for a lot of older software.)
As did other versions of OSX[0]. This whole meme should get a law like Betteridge’s. Complaints about the current release of macOS are as old as the hills[1] and have become entirely vacuous. That’s not to say the complaints aren’t necessarily without merit; just that there is too much hyperbole around them.
[0]https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apps-that-wont-work-on-... [1]https://youtu.be/GWxC8ezE4Dk
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#37Sure, it's a new filesystem; it's bound to have bugs. However, one pain point I've identified is that the existing tools often have no idea of how to deal with APFS. I'm currently typing this from a Mac with an APFS drive that is almost certainly experiencing filesystem corruption–I have folders that suddenly lose track of their contents and become impossible to delete; however, existing tools such as fsck, diskutil, etc. can't do anything to fix the issue, because their idea of how APFS works is woefully inadequate.
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#38Not to downplay the importance of this, but it reads as clickbait that you wait until the second paragraph to say "oh yeah, it's only sparsebundles. Just those things that almost nobody uses."
we use encrypted sparsebundle images to hold sensitive data: ssh keys, SSL keys, license files. I doubt I'm the only one, this is pretty important to our business.
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#39I tend to create sparsebundles to clone my git repos within, to get around the overhead of having huge numbers of inodes on a volume. (Copying, deleting, unpacking archives, Spotlight indexing—all are way slower when you have the worktrees and .git directories from a thousand large repos splayed out across your disk.) So I was a little worried here.
Thankfully, I had manually been setting my sparsebundles back to HFS+ on creation, because I saw no reason to make them APFS containers.
Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images
#40Two bugs are described in this article:
1. An APFS volume's free space doesn't reflect a smaller amount of free space on the underlying disk
2. The diskimages-helper application doesn't report errors when write requests fail to grow the disk image
These are not even complex problems of the new format. It is just Apple forgot to have basic checks. It is like the root access with an empty password incident happened 2 months ago. Why these serious but basic problems happen? What is going on with Apple?