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Wwdc intros APfs File system beta
From Ars Technica…
“APFS looks to be a major update over Apple’s old and creaky HFS+ file system, which has been around in one form or another for decades. It has been the subject of expansions and additions over the years, but HFS+ never approached the extensibility and flexibility of current next-generation file systems. Rather than continuing to bolt stuff onto the old code, we now (finally!) get a new file system that has some truly compelling features.”
Does this mean much to to the way Final cut works?
TimMaloney
Tim Maloney
Managing Director
Axis Films Melbourne Australia
ti*@***********om.au -
36 Replies
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Probably not. This has to do with drive formatting, so it might affect how libraries write to drives and therefore might introduce some compatibility issues with old and new libraries. It will also affect SANs and other shared operations.
But this is all usual Apple silliness. The “not developed in Cupertino” syndrome. They should simply adopt NTFS and be done with it.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “But this is all usual Apple silliness. The “not developed in Cupertino” syndrome. They should simply adopt NTFS and be done with it.”
This is bigger than hard drives. My guess is that APFS is a system that makes sense on phones, watches, music players, cars, and oh, maybe laptops and desktop computers, and further the killer app here is iCloud. That’s why we have things like nanosecond timestamping, file-level encryption and snapshots.
But it’s certainly also a validation of NTFS’s design. Microsoft has offered APFS-like features for years.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Here’s the Ars Technica article on APFS:
Read the comments on that article for Case Sensitive Filesystems or Not: The Debate. It’s Thunderdome.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Read the comments on that article for Case Sensitive Filesystems or Not: The Debate. It’s Thunderdome.”
My guess is it’s a tempest in a teapot. APFS isn’t even close to being done. The beta is an Alpha. ya know, like FCP X “release” was a beta. 😉
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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~\”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.\”~
~I still need to play Track Tetris sometimes. An old game that you can never win~
~\”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented\”~ -
[Charlie Austin] “[Walter Soyka] “Read the comments on that article for Case Sensitive Filesystems or Not: The Debate. It’s Thunderdome.”
My guess is it’s a tempest in a teapot. APFS isn’t even close to being done. The beta is an Alpha. ya know, like FCP X “release” was a beta. ;-)”
A tempest in a teapot doesn’t mean it’s not Thunderdome.
There’s also the distance between our version of a teapot and theirs. If you spend a career of 14 hour days writing code, case sensitivity is the exact definition of Thunderdome. That’s full contact stuff. Somebody gon get hurt.
To most of us, though, there’s not enough tempest in all that to fill a thimble, much less a teapot.
In general, that comment string supports my contention that even at its historical wooliest, I’d only have ranked the rancor here at about 2.4 on a scale of 10.
If you want some real fun, head on over to the Les Paul forum and start telling people you know the real story behind Jimmy Page’s Number One. My suggestion is that you should have all the children you’re planning to have before you do.
And certainly plenty of broken bleeding teeth to spit out of your mouth after a visit to any number of places at reddit.
What’s interesting to me is that Apple really has transitioned WWDC to an actual developers conference. It started off as basically Macworld minus the obeisance to a magazine that hadn’t been worth reading since the interregnum. New mice!
We’re over here feeling not as much disappointed with this event as ennervated by an unbroken string of such disappointments, stretching back to what turns out to be the last unambiguously ambitious play out of the infinite loop:
(wait for it)
Final Cut Pro X.
I mean, Beats/Apple Music was bold-ish, but it was also desperate because there was no internally- developed plan arriving quickly enough to staunch the bleeding from Apple’s music business.
(They also walked straight into Jimmy Iovine’s wallet with this. As he said after the sale, the only reason to start that business in the first place was to sell it to Apple. Well played, sir. I think he’s a genius, and that Apple is already giddy that they only had to pay $3 billion.)
Otherwise, it’s been years of mostly disappointingly iterative almost- news for anyone not a developer, and for them, only a little better than that.
Until this.
If it works right, as I suspect it will, this could be nearly the last time we speak of it. Soon, I’m betting we’ll talk about it even less than we talk about NTFS today, because it will work the way that modern file structures SHOULD work, and in other development environments already do.
Maybe this is another case of Apple showing up late because they wanted to get it right. Maybe they’re just plain late, but in the meantime, that comment string is mighty entertaining.
And maybe I just enjoy debates. LOL Nah, that ain’t it. LOL
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They need the COW’s five options to view the thread by.
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Apple File System will be out spring 2017 for everyone and will be the default file system to use at that point. Apple will offer a migration solution to move a volume from HFS+ to APFS.
A few nice features for us video-folks:
– File Cloning. Duplicated files that are identical take virtually zero extra space. As I understand it the file system handles file changes on byte level so only changes take extra space not necessarily the entire new file.
– Snapshots. Roll-back to any given point in time.
– Per file or complete volume encryption.
– Much smarter handing of volumes and partions than HFS+.
– Very low latency file access. Fast user response and reliable app-respons.
– Very fast headachy indexing. Get file- and folder-info instantly.
– Much better handing of file read / write / over-writes.
– Truly 64-bit / multithreaded.Basically it brings Apple back on par or possibly past the top-tier file-systems out there that also is far more future proof. HFS+ has solved a lot of the above with add-one such as TimeMachine (sort of ha does snapshots in a terrible way).
It supposed to be built for everything from tiny NAND drives in Apple Watches to multi-TB MacPro RAIDs and high performance PCIe storage.
How it turns out… We will see in about a year! 🙂
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I hope the software folks at Macdrive can also write software so PCs can read write this format. I don’t understand why pre existing formats like ext4 weren’t adopted so a tiny bit of compatibility to the real world wasn’t attempted … but Apple???
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Thanks Erik,
Nice summation of the pathway.
Tim
Tim Maloney
Managing Director
Axis Films Melbourne Australia
tim@axisfilms.com.au -
Sounds terrible, Erik. Thanks for all the bad news.
I’m kidding by the way.
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