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APFS

From party trick to file protection: sparse files have their uses

How to protect collections of files using different encryption passwords, and making most efficient use of storage space.

June 28, 2023 Macs, Technology

What to do with a disk error?

Disk errors threaten your data: how to detect them, how to use First Aid in Disk Utility, how to use fsck, and what to do with the disk afterward.

June 19, 2023 Macs, Technology

Customising metadata display in the Finder

Where to look for file metadata in the Finder, and how you can customise it, in spite of its apparent confusion. And how APFS takes care of extended attributes for you.

June 2, 2023 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: Should we be worried about data integrity?

From its outset, APFS hasn’t tested the integrity of file data stored on it. Would this be a good idea, or should macOS switch to the ZFS file system instead?

May 28, 2023 Macs, Technology

Inspect and control extended attributes with xattred 1.4

New version of this GUI utility for inspecting and editing extended attributes, for High Sierra and later.

May 18, 2023 Macs, Technology, Updates, xattr

Volume names, mount points and normalisation

How can you have two volumes in the same APFS container with identical names? How does macOS handle the conflicts?

May 16, 2023 Macs, Technology

COW and clones: how they save space and SSD wear

How does copy on write work, and how do clones grow apart? What effect do they have on the use of space and performance?

May 4, 2023 Macs, Technology

APFS hard links, symlinks, aliases and clone files: a summary

Similarities and differences, how to make each in the Finder and Terminal, how much space they use, and how they work in APFS.

April 28, 2023 Macs, Technology

Where does macOS get its volume free space figures from?

After studying thousand of log entries in less than 2 seconds, this is how macOS updates its values for purgeable and available space. But who uses them?

April 27, 2023 Macs, Technology

How Ventura space management tracks changes

Deleting two large files from a volume triggered the updating of figures for purgeable and available space within 9 seconds. Yet 6 minutes later, the Finder didn’t show those updated figures.

April 24, 2023 Macs, Technology

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