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MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

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Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#131

Post by T-N-T »

rangibaby wrote: post #47
tlo wrote: post #42

My AFPS volume got corrupted probably during the upgrade to High Sierra. No data lost, but my disk is missing almost half the disk space. See https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/311843/26185

I “lost” a lot of space due to time machine local backups. It was frustrating to research and I thought there was something seriously wrong with my computer. Try deleting the local backups and see if you get some space back

I had to make room on my MBP SSD to install windows through bootcamp and bashed my head against a wall on the same issue. It took me half an hour to find the reason why so much of my hard drive wasn't available despite me having deleted almost all third party apps and personal data on my macOS partition. Time Machine does 'local backups' and there is NOWHERE in the user interface that fully explains the space they occupy and how to get rid of it. To delete those local backups you need to use the terminal program tmutil.

That gave me even more vindication for my move. Also, you really don't know how fast your hardware is until you've used something other than macOS on it. From booting the system to launching software.. everything is snappier now.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#132

Post by bonestamp2 »

A friend of mine lost a ton of data this week after mac os crashed and he restarted it. The only things he had done since getting the computer a week ago were:

1. update to high sierra 2. copy over files from old mac 3. record about 40gb of screen share data using quicktime (which is what he was doing when it crashed)

He spent hours on the phone with apple, the tech said he had never seen anything like it and they weren't able to recover his data... but after reading the other horror stories in this thread there seems to be some serious problems with high sierra and/or APFS.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#133

Post by alwillis »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #103
alwillis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by far the best explanation of what’s happening at Apple and why we’re noticing these bugs and problems: https://www.imore.com/understanding-apple-scale

Rene Ritchie is very biased. He has to be as his livelihood depends on Apple. I take his words with many grains of salt. The only reason he's quoting Sinofsky is because it gives him a way of excusing Apple's software stumbles of late.

Rene Ritchie is very biased. He has to be as his livelihood depends on Apple.

No, he quoted Sinofsky because he’s one of the few people in the world who understands what it’s like trying to operate at this scale, since he was at Microsoft during it’s heyday.

Corner cases that affect only .01 percent of the installed bases aren’t a big deal when you’re operating at a few million; it’s entirely different when it’s more than a billion devices.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#134

Post by alwillis »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #103
alwillis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by far the best explanation of what’s happening at Apple and why we’re noticing these bugs and problems: https://www.imore.com/understanding-apple-scale

Rene Ritchie is very biased. He has to be as his livelihood depends on Apple. I take his words with many grains of salt. The only reason he's quoting Sinofsky is because it gives him a way of excusing Apple's software stumbles of late.

Also, nobody is harder on Apple than the people who know the company best. He’d lose credibility if he pretended everything was all rainbows and unicorns when they clearly are not. He clearly cites how unacceptable some of these bugs are—that’s not being biased.

Like Ritchie, I go back to the days of when the Macintosh Operating System shipped on floppies and didn’t have pre-emptive multitasking or memory protection—everything ran in the same memory space. The entire system would crash pretty regularly due to INIT (system extensions) conflicts, for example.

I can count on one hand the number of times my Mac has kernel panicked over the last few years and I regularly run beta versions of macOS.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#135

Post by alwillis »

gigatexal wrote: post #108
alwillis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple killed ZFS on macOS nearly 10 years ago. It wouldn’t make sense on a watch or a phone anyway: http://www.zdnet.com/article/mac-zfs-is-dead-rip/

200B in the bank and they couldn’t find a way to port it to other platforms? I think they could.

It’s not about not being able to port it; it’s not the right tool for the job. ZFS is a file system designed for servers; the Apple Watch, Apple TV and the iPhone and iPad aren’t servers.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#136

Post by michaelmrose »

bhj wrote: post #52
voldemort1968 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...So not an actual Apple Product.

My (limited) understanding of APFS is that it forgoes some integrity checks on the assumption that they have already been done by lower-level hardware. This is of course a debatable design decision, but it may indeed be unwise to use APFS on non-Apple hardware.

All modern hardware has this feature and I am unaware of apple hardware being significantly safer in this respect.

It was notable that this design decision because other modern fs refs,btrfs,zfs do feature additional integrity checks.

I guess the question would be if you suspect that Apple which is famous for marketing and ui are just smarter than the man centuries Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, have poured into filesystem research or if perhaps this is just a bad design decision.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#137

Post by djsumdog »

trynewideas wrote: post #114
toasterlovin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, APFS was deployed to almost a billion devices over the span of several months when it was release and, IIRC, this is the first major issue.

for a sufficiently narrow definition of "major issue" that excludes - the encryption password hint leak ("that was Disk Utility, not APFS") - APFS volume erasure issues ("also Disk Utility") - Adobe, Unity (editor and games built with it), Steam, Source Engine, and FCPX crash, performance, and asset loss issues on APFS volumes, all of which went away when moved to HFS+ volumes ("those teams should have adapted their…

There were multiple unicode issues on APFS reported here on HN, but I think those were before it went live.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#138

Post by djsumdog »

dcow wrote: post #116
torstenvl wrote: post #9

Yes, fairly limited impact, but still. Data loss is fucking important. We aren't talking about an occasional stutter when moving windows or a sound driver that sometimes needs a reboot to resume working. This is a major bug. I would really really like it if Apple would get their shit together so that people who actually rely on their computers to work correctly can upgrade at some point.

Or just stop using macOS. I wish I could give you my Debian Thinkpad for a week. Granted I've put some time into tweaking it because the sock gnome3 rounded matte shit is shit, but I bet you'd convert. The only issue is the screen aspect ratio Apple still wins there.

The first thing I do with a new PC laptop, after making sure Bluetooth and the other hardware all works in Windows, is to wipe it and start installing Linux. Lately I've just cloned my Gentoo install that I've maintained since 2012.

I keep around one Win10 laptop for gaming, but I prefer Linux for any real development work.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#139

Post by djsumdog »

x0x0 wrote: post #74
alwillis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by far the best explanation of what’s happening at Apple and why we’re noticing these bugs and problems: https://www.imore.com/understanding-apple-scale

Not really. If you built a new filesystem, competent software engineers will heavily test the corner cases. What happens when the fs runs out of space? What happens when the metadata store runs out of space? etc. The original article mentions bugs that are pretty obvious cases to test. What precisely happens when you have a sparsebundle that exceeds the storage capacity of the containing volume? A PM needs to define…

File systems are hard. They're incredibly difficult and incredibly important. It look a long time to get to ext4 and NTFS, and there's a reason HFS+ has stuck around for as long as it has, despite all of its shortcomings and limitations.

Even in the Linux work, thinks like btrfs, even though some distros consider it sable, is still treated with scrutiny. Back in the early 2000s, many Linux distros refused to install on XFS or JFS.

Apple's APFS rollout really does fell like it happened way too fast.

Re: MacOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images

#140

Post by csydas »

gruez wrote: post #115
toasterlovin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, APFS was deployed to almost a billion devices over the span of several months when it was release and, IIRC, this is the first major issue.

refs (microsoft's new filesystem)'s deployment went along much better. i haven't heard of any major issues since it came out in windows server 2012.

You haven't been reading then.

For people doing enterprise work and backups it's been a nightmare - here's one backup vendor that's been tracking issues with high RAM+CPU usage for almost 2 years now [1]. Early on if data reached over 2.0 TB, it would silently corrupt on certain cluster sizes and when deduplication was enabled. [2] Per the Veeam thread, the "fix" for [1] is only preventative, meaning that currently affected volumes will need to reformat entirely.

This doesn't excuse the APFS goofs, but silent data corruption and grinding servers to a halt just writing data to the system are pretty major show stoppers, never mind that ReFS can't be used for a host of every-day operations (i.e., it's a storage level solution, not really an every-day-driver style File System).

[1] - https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/refs-4k...

[2] - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2017/01/30/windo...

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