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For those who, like me, don't follow developments in this area closely: APFS is Apple's new filesystem, intended to be used across all of their devices (Macs,
by wolfgang42 10y ago
For those who, like me, don't follow developments in this area closely:
APFS is Apple's new filesystem, intended to be used across all of their devices (Macs, iOS, watchOS, etc). For Macs, it will be replacing HFS+, a direct descendant of the Hierarchical Filing System which has been used since 1985. (The original Macintosh Filing System, from 1984, was suitable only for floppy disks; among other things, it was a flat filing system and didn't really support folders.) The main improvements HFS+ made over HFS were support for larger files and Unicode; Apple has since added some more features but the core filesystem remains a 30-year-old format which was designed for early hard disks.
- twoodfin 10y agoIt replaced (as of iOS 10.3) HFS+ on the mobile devices as well, didn't it?
- Tanegashima 10y agoYes.
- agildehaus 10y agoAlmost correct. 32-bit devices that received iOS 10.3 did not receive APFS. It was exclusively delivered to 64-bit devices.
- orbitur 10y agoIt's also worth noting that the first 64-bit iPhone/iPad were released in 2013, so they've been around for a while. The iPhone 5c will have the shortest support window from its release, at 4 years.
- joelthelion 10y agoSo what features does the new filesystem bring?
- masklinn 10y agoIIRC there's COW blocks (crash protection), metadata checksumming, shared storage pools (a container can span multiple physical storage devices), snapshots, built-in encryptions, sparse files, I/O QoS and access patterns more suitable for solid-state, 64b across the board (64b inodes, 64b nanosecond-precision timestamps, …), better multithreading/multiprocessing behaviour. If you ask what innovations APFS brings to the overall FS landscape, the answer is probably "none".