Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. As long as the total space used by those five volumes is less than the 500 GB of total available space, things will just work.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. With APFS, you could create five volumes on a 500 GB drive and not worry about how much each one needs. However, if one volume just needed 20 GB of space, you'd have 80 GB of space wasted-unless you resized the volume and then allocated that space to another volume. If any of those volumes needed more than 100 GB of space, you'd have to manually resize the volumes. So, you might create five different 100 GB volumes on a 500 GB drive. Traditionally, if you created multiple volumes (partitions) on one physical disk, you had to decide up front how much space each volume would get. "Space sharing" is one new feature some people will benefit from today. The way FileVault encryption works hasn't changed yet, but one day macOS could use different encryption passphrases for each user's data and the system data. Related: How to Encrypt Your Mac's System Drive, Removable Devices, and Individual FilesĪPFS also supports multi-key encryption, which allows for different keys used to encrypt different data on the hard drive. Time Machine doesn't yet use APFS, but Apple could move Time Machine to APFS in a future release of macOS. Time Machine works similarly, but APFS's snapshots are even more efficient. Only new data you've added takes up space. The first snapshot contains a complete picture of the entire drive, while future snapshots only contain the changes made since the previous snapshot. This file system also lays the groundwork for new features and other improvements, which can build on what APFS offers.įor example, APFS incorporates snapshots at the file system level. It could be due to a bug, hardware failure, or something else-but the operating system can recognize it immediately. If the data doesn't match the checksum on disk, this indicates data corruption. When APFS reads data, it compares the data to the checksum on disk and verifies it matches. When APFS writes a file to disk, it examines the file, runs it through a mathematical formula that generates a shorter string that matches the file, and writes that to disk as well. Reliability is also improved thanks to APFS creating and storing checksums associated with data on the disk. This feature is also found in other modern file systems, like ZFS and BtrFS on Linux and ReFS on Windows.Īpple File System also uses something called "Atomic Safe-Save", which is like copy-on-write but applies to other file operations, including renaming a file or moving it. APFS points the original file at that metadata only after the new metadata is written, so there's no risk of the metadata being corrupted. With APFS, when you modify a file's metadata, APFS will create a new copy of the metadata. If your Mac crashes of the power goes out before the operation is finished, data corruption may occur. For example, when you update a file's metadata-like its file name, for example-the HFS+ file system will directly modify that metadata. Reliability and Data Integrity ImprovementsĪpple's new file system is more resistant to data corruption due to bugs and power failures, too.ĪPFS uses "copy-on-write". Mac OS X Extended offers compatibility with High Sierra as well as Macs running older versions of the macOS operating system. For example, exFAT offers greater compatibility with Windows and other devices. However, other file systems are recommended. You can choose to format an external drive as APFS with Disk Utility. Related: What File System Should I Use for My USB Drive?Įxternal drives, including USB drives and SD cards, will also not be migrated to APFS. While APFS doesn't work on Fusion Drives at the moment, Apple plans to enable APFS on Fusion Drives in the future. There's no way to opt out of this conversion.įusion Drives (which incorporate both flash and traditional magnetic storage), traditional hard disk drives, and non-Mac volumes (like Windows Boot Camp volumes) won't be migrated. On a Mac with all flash storage, the internal partitions will be migrated from HFS+ (also known as "Mac OS Extended") to APFS. The upgrade process will automatically migrate your Mac's internal drive from HFS+ to APFS, assuming your Mac's internal drive is an SSD or another all-flash storage device. You don't have to do anything special to switch your Mac to the new APFS file system. Related: What's New in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Available Now
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