4 ms·

... and it was a disappointment. Apple had the one-in-30-years opportunity to ship a state of the art file system, and they choose to not have protection agains

by Sweepi 3y ago

... and it was a disappointment. Apple had the one-in-30-years opportunity to ship a state of the art file system, and they choose to not have protection against user data bit rot (against meta data rot they choose yes, which is nice), which ZFS and others had for .. idk, a decade at this point?

specialist 3y ago
How feasible is it to add those kinds of features? Or would that have to be baked-in from the start?
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I wrote a small utility to find and dedup[0] using APFS features and had to poke around the user exposed metadata quite a bit. The short answer is probably. Metadata is extendable and there are things that work similarly already (encryption, and clone ids, for example). 0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/dedup https://github.com/ttkb-oss/dedup
postmodest 3y ago
...because their "disks" all have hardware ECC?
dmitrygr 3y ago
Why would this be needed, if every single Apple device uses flash memory which provides its own guarantees against bitrot?
- boxed 3y ago
  Because those guarantees aren't guarantees, more like partial mitigation.
  - dmitrygr 3y ago
    modern flash ECC may not always be able to correct but it is able to DETECT almost any number of bits wrong, so that is just as good as ZFS - if the data is banged - you'll know.
    - whartung 3y ago
      Is that a distinction between modern SSD drives and the small spinning drives? The ECC? Is a modern SSD more resistant to corruption than a modern spinning drive? And the drives I’m talking about the external usb drives everyone (me) have dangling off their machines (notably things like Time Machine and such).
- steve1977 3y ago
  and Apple doesn’t care about people connecting 3rd party hardware to Macs
diekhans 3y ago
No data checksumming is one of the main reasons not to trust APFS for valuable data. Maybe it is fine on Apple SSDs, but what about terabytes of data on external disks? Why checksum metadata if the SSD is so safe?

by Sweepi 3y ago

specialist 3y ago

How feasible is it to add those kinds of features? Or would that have to be baked-in from the start?

jonhohle 3y ago
I wrote a small utility to find and dedup[0] using APFS features and had to poke around the user exposed metadata quite a bit. The short answer is probably. Metadata is extendable and there are things that work similarly already (encryption, and clone ids, for example). 0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/dedup https://github.com/ttkb-oss/dedup

postmodest 3y ago

...because their "disks" all have hardware ECC?

dmitrygr 3y ago

Why would this be needed, if every single Apple device uses flash memory which provides its own guarantees against bitrot?

boxed 3y ago
Because those guarantees aren't guarantees, more like partial mitigation.
- dmitrygr 3y ago
  modern flash ECC may not always be able to correct but it is able to DETECT almost any number of bits wrong, so that is just as good as ZFS - if the data is banged - you'll know.
  - whartung 3y ago
    Is that a distinction between modern SSD drives and the small spinning drives? The ECC? Is a modern SSD more resistant to corruption than a modern spinning drive? And the drives I’m talking about the external usb drives everyone (me) have dangling off their machines (notably things like Time Machine and such).
steve1977 3y ago
and Apple doesn’t care about people connecting 3rd party hardware to Macs

diekhans 3y ago

No data checksumming is one of the main reasons not to trust APFS for valuable data. Maybe it is fine on Apple SSDs, but what about terabytes of data on external disks? Why checksum metadata if the SSD is so safe?