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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

#141

Post by djsumdog »

saagarjha wrote: post #37

Sure, 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…

> Sure, it's a new filesystem; it's bound to have bugs.

It's literally one of the most critical components of an operating system. Bugs in the filesystem or disk utilities are not small things. They have the potential to be disastrous.

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

#142

Post by djsumdog »

jaaames wrote: post #76
saagarjha wrote: post #37

Sure, 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…

Yep, I had an APFS volume that I couldn't even health check. I was pretty sure it was filesystem corruption as it'd hang and shut off randomly then come back up without issues, same as when the SSD died the first time. Also am r APFS time machine volume would never finish encrypting, even after being plugged in for days.

That could be hardware failure. I've had one SSD fail, back around 2013, and the often just lock up without warning. They'll work for 30 min ~ 1 hour and just stop and freeze.

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

#143

Post by saagarjha »

pram wrote: post #71
saagarjha wrote: post #37

Sure, 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…

There is a fsck_apfs, I’m pretty sure that’s what the repair button in the disk util runs.

Yes:

  # diskutil verifyVolume /dev/disk0s2
  Started file system verification on disk2s1 macOS
  Verifying file system
  Volume was successfully unmounted
  Performing fsck_apfs -n -x /dev/rdisk2s1
  Checking volume
  Checking the container superblock
  Checking the EFI jumpstart record
  Checking the space manager
  Checking the object map
  Checking the APFS volume superblock
  Checking the object map
  error: btn: invalid key (210, 16)
  Object map is invalid
  The volume /dev/rdisk2s1 could not be verified completely
  File system check exit code is 8
  Restoring the original state found as mounted
  Error: -69845: File system verify or repair failed
  Underlying error: 8: Exec format error

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

#144

Post by izacus »

alwillis wrote: post #133
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What difference does 1mil vs. 1bil make when they're deploying software on identical hardware? The type security and stability bugs showing in modern macOS and iOS are unacceptable at 100.000 installs. What does volume have to do with accepting empty root passwords?!

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

#145

Post by x0x0 »

dingo_bat wrote: post #117
x0x0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe they tested everything and didn't care. That's unlikely but possible.

My guess is more that MacOS just gets the B or C team, and no-one involved was smart enough or diligent enough to think through the implications of sparsebundles that don't reserve space.

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

#146

Post by benguild »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #132

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 we…

That sounds like a failing or faulty SSD. I had this problem on HFS+ on my fairly new 2011 MacBook Air. Downloaded a ton of data, system became unstable and wouldn’t boot after.

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

#147

Post by sebazzz »

dpkonofa wrote: post #130
gruez wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ReFS was only ever made the default on new installs of Windows Server 2012. It never actually made it to production builds of Windows 8 or above so it's actually only installed on a fraction of the systems that are out there. That's not really a sufficient sampling size to say that this deployment went along much better. The APFS update was a much, much larger endeavor and, based only on public response, was nearly s…

ReFS was not the default FS on Windows Server 2012, for many reasons, but one being that you cannot boot from it [1].

[1]: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-...

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

#148

Post by davrosthedalek »

StillBored wrote: post #46
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.

How do you know that? Filesystem corruption is frequently silent, and every-time it happens customers don't get on the phone and send the disks to apple so that they can root cause the problem. Its quite possible this bug has happened an untold number of times before it happened to someone who went through the effort to reproduce and isolate it.

Also, I'd guess the use pattern on ios is rather different, and more homogeneous, from the use pattern in macos. I don't think these millions of devices really give Apple good code coverage.

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

#149

Post by knolan »

kbumsik wrote: post #40

Two 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 m…

> Apple forgot to have basic checks

A common issue with Apple lately.

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

#150

Post by toyg »

alwillis wrote: post #134
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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—…

So we now measure the reliability of a consumer-grade system on closed hardware by how few times it experiences a kernel panic?

That’s a very low bar. At least Windows has the excuse of having to work with a bazillion drivers.

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