{"id":27024,"date":"2017-09-11T09:02:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T13:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/?p=27024"},"modified":"2017-09-05T09:05:45","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T13:05:45","slug":"what-is-apfs-and-why-should-you-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/what-is-apfs-and-why-should-you-care\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is APFS (and Why Should You Care)?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A major change in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple\u2019s new Apple File System, or APFS. With any luck, you\u2019ll 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\u2019s unpack what APFS is, why you should care, and what gotchas you might encounter.<\/p>\n<p>A file system is a mechanism for storing files on a hard disk or SSD\u2014it 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\u2019t have to learn anything new when Apple starts using APFS.<\/p>\n<p>Why is Apple making this switch? In 1985, Apple first developed the Hierarchical File System (HFS) for the 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\u2019t designed to deal with terabyte-sized drives, solid-state drives based on flash storage, full-disk encryption, or supercomputer-class Macs.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s where APFS comes in. Being a modern file system, it\u2019s vastly faster than HFS+. For instance, have you ever used File &gt; 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\u2019s gigabytes in size. Saving files should also be faster.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog.png\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 442px) 100vw, 442px\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog.png 812w, https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog-300x88.png 300w, https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog-768x224.png 768w\" alt=\"\" width=\"442\" height=\"129\" data-attachment-id=\"5207\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/what-is-apfs-and-why-should-you-care\/apfs-dialog\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog.png\" data-orig-size=\"812,237\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"APFS-dialog\" data-image-description=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog-300x88.png\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog.png\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" class=\"lazyload\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 442px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 442\/129;\" \/><\/p>\n<p>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 it always has.<\/p>\n<p>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 conversion, and the installation will take a bit longer. However, if your Mac has a hard disk drive or Fusion Drive, it won\u2019t be converted to APFS at this time. (If you\u2019re not sure what sort of storage your Mac has, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab.)<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s one gotcha, and although there are others, they get pretty geeky and most won\u2019t affect you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Macs running OS X 10.11 El Capitan and earlier cannot mount or read volumes formatted as APFS. So don\u2019t 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+.<\/li>\n<li>Although the High Sierra installer can convert a volume from HFS+ to APFS during installation, you cannot convert an APFS volume back to HFS+ without first erasing it. You\u2019ll have to back up any data on it, format as APFS, and then restore the data.<\/li>\n<li>We recommend against using old disk repair and recovery software that hasn\u2019t been updated for High Sierra on an APFS-formatted volume.<\/li>\n<li>Apple\u2019s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on your Mac, doesn\u2019t support read\/write to APFS-formatted Mac volumes.<\/li>\n<li>Volumes formatted as APFS can\u2019t offer share points over the network using AFP and must instead use SMB or NFS.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Apart from the problem of APFS-formatted USB flash drives not being readable by older Macs (or Windows computers), most people shouldn\u2019t run into any problems with APFS\u2014everything it changes is under the hood and will just result in a Mac that\u2019s faster, more reliable, and more secure. And since Apple already quietly transitioned millions of iOS devices to APFS, it\u2019s a good bet that switching millions of Macs to it will go equally smoothly.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><b>Twitter:<\/b> macOS 10.13 High Sierra may convert your drive to APFS\u2014but what does that mean, and why should you care? We explain at:<\/p>\n<p><b>Facebook:<\/b> You might have heard that macOS 10.13 High Sierra will convert your drive to APFS. It\u2019s a good thing, but there are some gotchas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A major change in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple\u2019s new Apple File System, or APFS. With any luck, you\u2019ll 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\u2019s unpack what APFS is, why [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[299,66,56,194,39,71,48,97,5,86,105,167,196,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apfs","category-article","category-asmc","category-asmc-archive","category-blog","category-explainer","category-ios","category-ios-10","category-mac","category-macos","category-maintenance","category-performance","category-restricted-content","category-security"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/APFS-dialog.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YLEm-71S","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":27286,"url":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/what-is-a-fusion-drive-and-why-should-you-care\/","url_meta":{"origin":27024,"position":0},"title":"What Is a Fusion Drive, and Why Should You Care?","author":"computeradv","date":"November 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"There are two basic types of storage devices available today: hard disk drives and solid-state drives. For the lowest cost per gigabyte, you can\u2019t go wrong with a hard drive, and they come in truly massive sizes\u2014up to a whopping 8 terabytes. However, they\u2019re relatively slow. For speed, you want\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;APFS&quot;","block_context":{"text":"APFS","link":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/category\/apfs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":27017,"url":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/when-should-you-upgrade-to-macos-10-13-high-sierra-ios-11-watchos-4-and-tvos-11\/","url_meta":{"origin":27024,"position":1},"title":"When Should You Upgrade to macOS 10.13 High Sierra, iOS 11, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11?","author":"computeradv","date":"September 9, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"To every thing there is a season, and we\u2019re fast approaching the time when Apple harvests the fruit of the last year and releases new versions of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. There are no major surprises here, since Apple announced the new versions in June and public betas have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Apple Pros&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Apple Pros","link":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/category\/apple-pros\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/when-should-you-upgrade-2017-high-sierra.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/when-should-you-upgrade-2017-high-sierra.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/when-should-you-upgrade-2017-high-sierra.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/when-should-you-upgrade-2017-high-sierra.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":27111,"url":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/whats-new-in-macos-10-13-high-sierra-and-its-main-apps\/","url_meta":{"origin":27024,"position":2},"title":"What\u2019s New in macOS 10.13 High Sierra and Its Main Apps","author":"computeradv","date":"September 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Although Apple\u2019s eye-catching Desktop image of the High Sierra mountains makes it easy to confirm that your Mac is running High Sierra, the most noteworthy new features are invisible! These changes are aimed at improving your Mac\u2019s performance. But, don\u2019t worry that there\u2019s nothing new in High Sierra to play\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;APFS&quot;","block_context":{"text":"APFS","link":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/category\/apfs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/High-Sierra-features-Photos-1024x666.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/High-Sierra-features-Photos-1024x666.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/High-Sierra-features-Photos-1024x666.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tcn.tidbits.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/High-Sierra-features-Photos-1024x666.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":29905,"url":"http:\/\/www.computeradvantage.us\/v3\/you-can-now-access-flash-drives-on-an-iphone-or-ipad-heres-how\/","url_meta":{"origin":27024,"position":3},"title":"You Can Now Access Flash Drives on an iPhone or iPad\u2014Here\u2019s How","author":"computeradv","date":"November 18, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"An unexpected and useful feature of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 is also nearly invisible, and for most uses, requires a special adapter. 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