When you updated your iPhone or iPad to iOS 10.3 six years ago, you were among the first to use Apple File System, although you didn’t know it at the time.
APFS
Enabling the TRIM command was once thought important to maintain good write performance on SSDs. What has happened to it? Should we still be enabling it?
Traced from recognition of the cable connection, through establishing PCI streams, to mounting the volume with APFS, and the bonus of a good trim at the end.
Is the performance overhead of using APFS Encrypted volumes to store sensitive data a reason for not doing so?
You’re running bit short of disk space, so put tens of GB of old files into the Trash, then empty it. Why doesn’t the amount of free space increase?
Backing up with Time Machine to a NAS or other network storage is different. Here’s an account of how it creates and handles sparse bundle storage in Ventura 13.2.
How APFS can trim free space in a read/write disk image and transform it into a sparse file, so it uses storage more efficiently.
Plain read/write (UDRW), sparse image (UDSP), and sparse bundle (UDSB) compared for storage efficiency, performance, and convenience.
In Monterey and Ventura, regular read-write UDRW disk images can now be APFS sparse files, and work more efficiently than sparse images or sparse bundles.
Disk images originated in the 1960s, and are still valuable tools in modern macOS. They have their limitations, though, and in some cases should be replaced by APFS volumes.
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