{"id":42743,"date":"2024-04-03T15:05:18","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T19:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42743"},"modified":"2024-04-03T15:10:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T19:10:25","slug":"seven-years-of-apfs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/03\/seven-years-of-apfs\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Years of APFS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Although APFS has certainly had its moments over the last seven years, Apple’s gambles have paid off, and proved key to the success of Apple silicon Macs. Had there been no APFS, many of the fundamental technologies like Secure Boot and the Signed System Volume (SSV) would have been far tougher if not impossible to implement.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

What has attracted almost no attention, though, is how APFS is designed to prolong the working life of SSDs by minimising the number of write\/erase cycles. Although the user may be unable to realise the space efficiency achieved with the use of sparse and clone files, for instance, by reducing the number of storage blocks actually written in order to store files, with APFS each write\/erase cycle should store unique data rather than needless copies or null data.<\/p>\n

This is of little or no comfort to those condemned to use hard disks for storage, even if only for Time Machine backups. Although the great majority of APFS users’ devices will never be connected to a hard disk, for the small minority running it in macOS, they remain the medium of choice for backups and other bulk storage, and vulnerable to performance degradation resulting from fragmentation by the file system.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Although Apple dropped early hints that APFS might be released as open source, after seven years information about its internals released by Apple still appears to be insufficient to allow third-party developers to create maintenance tools independent of those bundled in macOS. This isn’t just about the potential for someone outside Apple to improve on the performance of fsck<\/code> or Disk Utility, but also concerns features that Apple shows no sign of supporting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For me, the biggest issues are:<\/p>\n