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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

#111

Post by viraptor »

hueving wrote: post #107
zbentley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata != filesystem issue. If you have more information about the problem you encountered and how it implicates/interacts with APFS, please do link to it. Otherwise, bug reports via circumstantial evidence are, while not inherently false, certainly suspect.

You missed the point. The anecdote was to illustrate how even power users might be working around filesystem bugs so a lack of bug reports specifically mentioning APFS is certainly not proof that there aren't problems.

It's also quite hard to report fs issues. I ended up one day with a not working apfs system. Boot was ok, but I couldn't mount the user partition. Apfs repair tool just failed and made the system hang. After a number of restarts, attempts at repair, and attempts to move the partion somewhere it can be decrypted, everything started working. And I actually had enough experience to try and debug/fix it - many people would end up wiping the system, or having to go to Apple shop.

This is not reportable. I got only a generic error or hanging system. I can't reproduce it. I don't know why it started and why it finished. Yet, it was almost certainly an apfs issue.

Even if I wanted to play, my priority was to get the work laptop usable again.

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

#112

Post by martinald »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #73
protomyth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lion actively screwed up normal people's workflows with the botched "Save As" replacement. I still want an explanation of why they thought that was a good idea. We skipped that one after one of the admin assistants discovered the new joy. The whole California-series of OS has had a broken Finder. I see some fixes in High Sierra, but its still buggy as heck for large file moves and broken scripting. I'm hoping they ta…

I know I sound like an old crank, but I've been a Mac user since 1984. And the last MacOS version that I completely trusted as being loyal to my needs and workflow was Snow Leopard. Every later version has felt like it was really Apple's OS and I was just borrowing it.

Totally agree. I used to be excited about upgrading MacOS; now I absolutely dread it. I only upgrade when Xcode etc doesn't work on old OS anymore.

Until 10.13.3 I could barely use my MBP; horrendous graphical corruption issues. How this can happen I have no idea.

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

#113

Post by derefr »

vvhn wrote: post #98
derefr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't think there's any way to get around it, if you've got an indexer daemon in the mix. It's pretty much the same as trying to store billions of rows in a RDBMS table, except that file systems+metadata indexes don't have any concept of table partitioning.

Space shared APFS volumes inside a container give you the “table partitioning” you want. You can even set them up to have different case sensitivity options. All your dev work in a case sensitive volume for instance and Adobe software on a case insensitive volume on the same space shared container.

True! My disk-image-centered workflow comes from before APFS volumes were a thing; I haven't bothered to re-evaluate it. (It is nice that I can just schlep one of these volumes around by copying one file, rather than waiting for thousands/millions of small files to compress, copying the archive, and then decompressing on the other end, though. Do you know if there's an easy method of doing a block-level export from an APFS volume to a sparsebundle disk image, or vice-versa? That'd be killer for this.)

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

#114

Post by trynewideas »

toasterlovin wrote: post #16
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.

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 software during beta")

- performance and incompatibility issues with spinning-disk drives ("platters are bad, APFS is designed for SSDs")

- RAID kernel panics, even on supported RAID 0 configurations ("that's corecrypto, not APFS")

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

#115

Post by gruez »

toasterlovin wrote: post #16
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.

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.

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

#116

Post by dcow »

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.

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

#117

Post by dingo_bat »

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…

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

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

#118

Post by callalex »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #73
protomyth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lion actively screwed up normal people's workflows with the botched "Save As" replacement. I still want an explanation of why they thought that was a good idea. We skipped that one after one of the admin assistants discovered the new joy. The whole California-series of OS has had a broken Finder. I see some fixes in High Sierra, but its still buggy as heck for large file moves and broken scripting. I'm hoping they ta…

I know I sound like an old crank, but I've been a Mac user since 1984. And the last MacOS version that I completely trusted as being loyal to my needs and workflow was Snow Leopard. Every later version has felt like it was really Apple's OS and I was just borrowing it.

It’s certainly no coincidence that the last version of OS X that you could buy with money (be a customer) was Lion, which marked the beginning of a decline.

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

#119

Post by FreakyT »

sbuk wrote: post #36
FreakyT wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh I fully understand that. However, in the past, I would argue those versions actually added useful things, so there was a bit of a tradeoff to consider.

High Sierra has essentially no enhancements whatsoever.

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

#120

Post by Macha »

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…

Glass wall induced forgetfulness? https://thenextweb.com/apple/2018/02/17/apple-employees-keep...
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