A major change in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple's new Apple File System, or APFS. Sound utility software. With any luck, you'll 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's unpack what APFS is, why you should care, and what gotchas you might encounter.
APFS also adds a copy-on-write metadata scheme that Apple calls 'Crash Protection,' which aims to ensure that file system commits and writes to the file system journal stay in sync even if. Disk Utility with APFS Volumes In the Terminal, running diskutil list will reveal this in even starker contrast. You can see disk2s2 in the screenshot below, the partition on my external hard drive.
A file system is a mechanism for storing files on a hard disk or SSD—it 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't have to learn anything new when Apple starts using APFS.
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't designed to deal with terabyte-sized drives, solid-state drives based on flash storage, full-disk encryption, or supercomputer-class Macs.
A file system is a mechanism for storing files on a hard disk or SSD—it 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't have to learn anything new when Apple starts using APFS.
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't designed to deal with terabyte-sized drives, solid-state drives based on flash storage, full-disk encryption, or supercomputer-class Macs.
That's where APFS comes in. Being a modern file system, it's vastly faster than HFS+. For instance, have you ever used File > 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's gigabytes in size. Saving files should also be faster.
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.
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't be converted to APFS at this time. (If you're not sure what sort of storage your Mac has, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab.)
What Is Apfs
File list export 2 4 0 3. That's one gotcha, and although there are others, they get pretty geeky and most won't affect you:
- Macs running OS X 10.11 El Capitan and earlier cannot mount or read volumes formatted as APFS. So don't 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+.
- 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'll have to back up any data on it, format as APFS, and then restore the data.
- We recommend against using old disk repair and recovery software that hasn't been updated for High Sierra on an APFS-formatted volume.
- Apple's Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on your Mac, doesn't support read/write to APFS-formatted Mac volumes.
- Volumes formatted as APFS can't offer share points over the network using AFP and must instead use SMB or NFS.
Apart from the problem of APFS-formatted USB flash drives not being readable by older Macs (or Windows computers), most people shouldn't run into any problems with APFS—everything it changes is under the hood and will just result in a Mac that's faster, more reliable, and more secure. And since Apple already quietly transitioned millions of iOS devices to APFS, it's a good bet that switching millions of Macs to it will go equally smoothly.
I have a 2TB external hard drive with APFS encrypted. One day I inserted it into Mac computer and find encrypted APFS media is uninitialized in disk utility. There are many important documents stored in it, how to recover lost data from uninitialized APFS drive?
Although Apple has released APFS file sysem several month, but up to now, there are a few software which can support APFS data recovery in market due to technical difficulty, M3 Data Recovery for Mac is such a APFS data recovery software which can undelete files from APFS drive, recover lost data from formatted, corrupted, unreadable, unmountable, uninitialized APFS drive, recover lost data from deleted, lost, misssing, disappeared APFS partition, recover deleted or lost files from encrypted APFS drive, etc. on macOS Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/Sierra 10.12/10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8. Office 2016 not working on catalina. Free apple computer apps.
Tutorial to recover lost data from uninitialized AppleAPFSMedia
Apple File System Apfs
Step 1: Download and install this APFS Data Recovery software on your Mac computer.
Step 2: Run this APFS Data Recovery software - M3 Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 3: Click 'Find Lost APFS Partitions' in M3 Data Recovery for Mac.
Apfs Encrypted Performance
Step 4: Select uninitialized AppleAPFSMedia and click Next to find previously existing APFS partition.
Apfs File System Mac
Step 5: Once the previously existing APFS partition is found, please select it and click Next to scan lost data. If the APFS drive is encrypted, the password is required at this step.
Step 6: After the lost data found, we can preview them or click Recover to recover them.
