Fareham — Mar 10th 2018

This introduction to Apple’s new Drive Format bringing Macs up to the standard for all other Apple devices, briefly covered the history of HFS+ or macOS Extended (journaled) format, and then looked at the new APFS automatically installed with High Sierra on all SSD-equipped Macs. Euan discussed current use limitations such as those for Hard and Fusion drives, Time Machine backups, RAID and Bootcamp, as well as access to data on APFS formatted drives from non-APFS formatted ones.

We looked at the major technical features introduced with APFS — Encryption, Snapshots, Space Sharing, fast Directory Sizing, Metadata, Sparse Files, and consistent use of Metadata Checksums to improve data integrity.

APFS introduces Containers and Volumes to the HFS+ world of partitons. Unlike partitions, volumes can be size-elastic, which is convenient, and this development has brought considerable changes to High Sierra’s Disk Utility.

Euan reminded us about the importance of ensuring the health of your Sierra (or earlier) macOS before making major upgrades. If there is any doubt about the current installation best practise is first to make a clone, or at least an up-to-date Time Machine backup, then erase the current drive data before making a completely fresh installation of High Sierra. Extra Partitions can then be added to Hard Drives, and if you are using an SSD with APSF, the option will be to choose partitions or (recommended) volumes. Migration Assistant can then migrate your data to the newly reformatted drive.

Changes to Recovery Mode options and System Integrity Protection (SIP) followed by questions and discussion rounded off the meeting.

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