Are you ready for APFS?

ByEmily Dolloff

A major change in the MacOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple’s new Apple File system, or APFS. This was covered pretty heavily in the announcements earlier this year but many of us might have let it slip our minds. With any luck, you’ll barely notice the change, just as almost no one did earlier this year when Apple updated millions of iOS devices to APFS with iOS 10.3. But let’s unpack what APFS is, why you should care, and what gotchas you might encounter.

A file system is a mechanism for storing files on a hard disk or SSD– it keeps track of where on the drive the pieces that make up each file are located, along with metadata about each file, such as its name, size, creation and modification dates, and so on. You see all this information in the Finder, but since the file system is a level below the Finder, you won’t have to learn anything new when Apple starts using APFS.

Why is Apple making this switch? In 1985, Apple first developed the Hierarchical File System (HFS) for Mac, later replacing it with HFS+ in 1998. Although HFS+, now called Mac OS Extended in Disk Utility, has received numerous updates in the last two decades, it wasn’t designed to deal with terabyte-sized drives, solid-state drives based on flash storage, full-disk encryption, or supercomputer-class Macs.

That’s where APFS comes in. Being a modern file system, it’s vastly faster than HFS+. For instance, have you ever used File > Get Info to see how much disk space a folder uses? For a folder containing thousands of files, it can take minutes before you see that number. But with APFS, calculating folder sizes becomes nearly instantaneous, as does duplicating a file that’s gigabytes in size. Saving files should also be faster.

APFS is also more resistant to data loss or file corruption due to application crashes, and it keeps your data more secure with advanced backup and encryption capabilities. If you use FileVault to encrypt your drive, APFS will change the underlying encryption mechanism during the upgrade, but everything will look and work just as always has.

When you install High Sierra on a Mac with an SSD or Flash Storage, which includes all recent Mac Notebooks and many desktop Macs, your drive will be converted to APFS automatically. You cannot opt out of the conversions, and the installation will take a bit longer. However, if your Mac has a hard disk drive for Fusion Drive, it can’t be converted to APFS at this time. (If you’re not sure what sort of storage your Mac has, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab) This is one of those gotcha’s I mentioned, there are others. However, most won’t affect you. Here are some things to be aware of that you might notice.

-Mac’s running OS X 10.11 El Capitan and earlier cannot mount or read volumes formatted as APFS. So don’t format external hard disks or USB flash drives as APFS if you might need to use them with older Macs. However, Macs running High Sierra from APFS-formatted drives work fine with external hard disks still formatted as HFS+

-Although the High Sierra installed can convert a volume from HFS+ to APFS during installation, you cannot convert an APFS volume back to HFS+without first erasing it. You’ll have to back up any data on it, format as APFS and then restore the data.

-I recommend against using old disk repair and recovery software that hasn’t been updated for High Sierra on an APFS-formatted volume.

-Apple’s Book Camp, which lets you run Windows on your Mac doesn’t support read/write to APFS-formatted Mac Volumes

-Volumes formatted as APFS can’t offer share points over the network using AFP and must instead use SMB or NFS.

Apart from the problem of APFS-formatted USB flash drives not being readable by older Macs most people shouldn’t run into any problems with APFS. The changes are all under the hood and will just result in a faster Mac, a more reliable machine and one that is more secure. It’s unlikely that most users will even notice these changes, so back up your Mac and install High Sierra!

Similar Posts

  • Dear Friends,

    After several days in the 80’s we are heading for the 30s tonight. The apples are ready to be picked and after years of trying to coax apples on my trees, they are loaded this year. Speaking of apples, we harvested a big batch of discontinued and “bad box” Macs, iPads, and accessories. As we go through this gear to verify the quality and get it ready for sale we will list them at our Clearance section on the website.

    Speaking of the website, smalldog.com has been refreshed lately. Check out the new look. I think Mike Moffit did an awesome job in modernizing our online presence. More changes are coming but let me know what you think of the new look!

    And in Cubs news, the Cubbies won their division for the second year in a row! YEAH! Go Cubs Go!

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is a brand new iPad Air 2 32GB Wi-Fi in Gold. The box for this item is a bit scuffed but the contents are complete and brand new. Apple sold this unit for $449 new but for the 4 that I have in stock you can have one for just $299.99!

  • I hear tell that Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom is in full foliage so I might have to take a spin up to see the colors. It is a beautiful time in Vermont and if you can avoid the hundreds of migrant leaf-peepers the scenery is simply breathtaking with the thousands of shades of red, green, brown and yellow.

    I think some Cubbies playoff TV is also on the calendar as we enter that part of the year with baseball, hockey, football, and basketball all being played. It makes me and Jezebel into some serious couch potatoes!

    Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • Your Personal Hotspot in your Pocket

    Finding good Internet access for your Mac or Wi-Fi-only iPad while traveling can be maddening. Look in your Wi-Fi menu while sitting in an airport and you’ll see a bunch of networks, most of which require a password, are someone’s printer or won’t connect for other reasons. It isn’t any better when you reach your destination since many hotels charge outrageous rates for Wi-Fi. When I am traveling on my motorcycle and looking for a hotel finding reliable Wi-Fi can be a challenge. And while you might be able to find a Starbucks with free public Wi-Fi, those networks may not be secure—a hacker on the same network could watch your unencrypted Internet traffic.

    If you’re like most Apple users, the solution is in your pocket or purse: your iPhone! For a number of years, turning on iOS’s Personal Hotspot feature involved additional fees from your cellular carrier, which dissuaded many people from using it. Nowadays, however, most mobile phone plans don’t charge extra for tethering, as it’s most often called. If you have an “unlimited” plan, your carrier may throttle your bandwidth if you exceed some usage level because the carrier doesn’t want customers to use tethering for their primary Internet connections. Double-check your plan, but if you won’t have to pay more to use tethering, here’s how to use it to solve Wi-Fi problems while on the road.

    On your iPhone (or cellular-enabled iPad), go to Settings > Personal Hotspot and enable the switch for Personal Hotspot. Then tap Wi-Fi Password, and in the next screen, enter a password. It must be at least 8 characters and can use only ASCII characters (English letters, numbers, and standard punctuation marks). It shouldn’t be trivial (like “password”), but don’t worry about making it super strong, since your iPhone isn’t likely to be in any single location long enough for someone to try to crack it. (You can also share a Personal Hotspot connection via Bluetooth or a USB cable, but both are fussier and may not work as well).

    Then, from your Mac, click the Wi-Fi menu in the menu bar and choose the network named for your iPhone—it may appear under a Personal Hotspot heading and will have a Personal Hotspot icon. From an iPad or another iOS device, go to Settings > Wi-Fi and select the iPhone’s network.

    In either case, if both devices are signed into the same iCloud account and have Bluetooth turned on, Apple’s Instant Hotspot feature should make it so you don’t have to enter the password. It’s no great hardship if you do have to type the password; the Mac or iPad should remember it for future use.

    Once you’re connected, everything should work just as though you were using a normal Wi-Fi network. Performance might be a little slow, but since random public Wi-Fi networks are often pokey, it may be better than you’d get otherwise.

    I have found that even sharing a cellular network connection with a Personal Hotspot to your Mac or iPad from your iPhone can be faster than the Wi-Fi in some convention halls or hotels.

    If you worry about using too much data and generating overage charges or getting throttled, pay attention to what apps and services use bandwidth on your Mac. Things like Dropbox, Backblaze, and iCloud Photo Library can slurp a lot of data in the background so you may want to turn them off.

    When you finish tethering, turn off the Personal Hotspot switch on your iPhone to make sure it doesn’t use any extra battery life or allow another of your devices to consume cellular data inadvertently. Your iPhone will tell you with a banner on the home screen if you have devices connected to your Personal Hotspot.