Talk:Apple File System

Copyrighted work?

This article definitely deserves an entry, but most of it seems ripped from the Apple Developer page. #!/bin/DokReggar -talk 15:49, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the article is largely plagiarism. This must be removed.–Totie (talk) 00:29, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Vaporware?

It seems that the filesystem is announced for next year. Given the fact that it takes 10 years to make a new filesystem usable in real life, I cannot understand the hype for a filesystem that promises less features than ZFS implemented 15 years ago. Schily (talk) 08:35, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

This is not vaporware. It's available to developers now with macOS Sierra Beta 1. It was announced on June 13 2016 and will be available to the public next year. The hype is about macOS finally getting first party support for a FS that has many of the features of ZFS Ccunning (talk) 12:24, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

CNIDs are 60 bit wide, not 64 bit.

"The statement "APFS supports 64-bit inode numbers" is technically incorrect, as the upper 4 bits are used as flags in the "fs_file" (= catalog) tree. Sadly, Apple's own docs haven't clarified that yet, and my own research hasn't been published, yet. There's a paper that clarifies this, but it's behind a paywall: [the APFS file system]. So I guess I cannot simply change the article or I'll get blamed for posting original research. Meh, not a serious issue, anyway. Tempel (talk) 18:21, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Compression or not?

The article is confusing (to me at least), it says "Transparent compression Yes (same as in HFS+)" and also under Limitation states "and does not support compression yet." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.80.106.33 (talk • contribs) 12:29, October 1, 2017 (UTC)

Updated the article with a source. AlistairMcMillan (talk) 19:32, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Removed this from the article...

" Similar to LVM and Apple's Fusion Drive feature, an APFS container can be either a single physical partition or built from two partitions on separate drives."

I can't find anything in the documentation that suggests an APFS container can be spread across multiple devices. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. AlistairMcMillan (talk) 17:36, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Limitations of using APFS with Time Machine

The article currently states "…APFS is not yet an option for its backup volumes (as of macOS 10.13 High Sierra)." The Apple articles themselves are not clear on this topic. "Use a shared folder with Time Machine" [1] states that APFS is required for sharing a folder for Time Machine use (i.e. backing up multiple Macs to one folder), while "Disks you can use with Time Machine" [2] says "Time Machine can’t back up to an APFS-formatted disk." I suppose the article can't be updated until Apple gets their act together, but this is a fairly important point for admins hoping to set up a server as centralized backup. Xmarc999 (talk) 01:59, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Indexed Directory Files

Does APFS bring indexed directory files to Apple devices? That is, directory information is stored in a indexed/hashed structure so that referencing files is almost instantaneous, even if the directory contains thousands of entries (as opposed to older filesystems where directory information is stored as an array and lookup times expand as number of entries grows).

I cannot see in information from Apple if APFS implements this feature. For comparison, see HTree Indexed Directories in Ext4.