What do you do when you discover your Mac’s Data volume has run out of free space? A guide to working with snapshots, iCloud Drive, and other tricks to salvage your Mac. And how to prevent this from happening again.
APFS
How can you assure yourself that important files retain their data intact? Here’s a simple strategy for doing that, which works better on a file system that doesn’t check integrity.
Does software encryption (APFS Encrypted) result in significant overhead when using faster SSDs with a faster Apple silicon Mac? What about computing SHA256 digests?
Four little utilities now compatible with macOS Tahoes, covering repair of Finder aliases, creating test sparse files and checking special file types, looking up UTI types, and analysing language.
How your password isn’t used to encrypt the Data volume on your Mac’s internal SSD, but is used to encrypt the key used for that encryption, and the benefits.
There are substantial differences in the structure of the internal disks in macOS, iPadOS and iOS, as shown here. And there are at least 24 cryptexes now used to support AI.
Should you run First Aid on your Data volume before updating macOS, or as routine housekeeping? And how should you run it?
Distinguishing conventional copies, clone files, symlinks, hard links and Finder aliases can be confusing. Here’s how to tell them apart with using Terminal.
Read-write and VM disk images are created and maintained differently, but they can both be APFS sparse files. Explanation of their creation and maintenance.
From early code pages based on language-specific variants of Extended ASCII, through 2-byte support in WorldScript II, to Unicode and the annual emoji update.
The Eclectic Light Company 