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APFS

Take control of disks using APFS

Speed up your hard disk by partitioning it so that its innermost 20% remains unused. Reserve space for the SLC write cache on an SSD by limiting the size of volumes.

March 18, 2025 Macs, Technology

Friday Magic: How to make disk space unpurgeable

When it started up after its macOS update, available space on its internal SSD had shot from about 160 GB to nearly 400 GB. Where had all my files gone?

February 28, 2025 Macs, Technology

FileVault and volume encryption explained

How FileVault and APFS Encrypted are enabled and managed differently, and details of how they work internally. Concentrates on T2 and Apple silicon Macs, but also covers older Intel models.

January 10, 2025 Macs, Technology

Why use APFS?

Deciding which file system to use for hard disks can be difficult. Here are the advantages and disadvantages explained in detail, for HFS+ and APFS.

January 9, 2025 Macs, Technology

Why all the snapshots?

How snapshots are created from a volume in around 0.01 second, why they will grow in size over time, how they can only be of complete volumes, and can’t be edited.

January 7, 2025 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: How Apple silicon came so quickly

It’s September 2016. Apple has just released the iPhone 7, with its first big.LITTLE CPU cores, then 4 days later macOS 10.12 Sierra. How does it transition from there to release the M1 in four years?

January 5, 2025 Macs, Technology

How macOS has become more private

T T Read More

Frameworks provide much of the macOS API. Over the last 5 years, the percentage of Private Frameworks has risen from 76% to 84%. Why is macOS becoming more private?

January 2, 2025 Macs, Technology

How do APFS volume roles work?

What separates System and Data volumes, and how does macOS know they’re part of a boot volume group? What distinguished backup volumes, and what is Sidecar?

November 21, 2024 Macs, Technology

Planning complex Time Machine backups for efficiency

Understand how TM backs up and how snapshots work to minimise the size of local snapshots and backups, and the time they take. How to ensure files in iCloud Drive are backed up properly.

October 28, 2024 Macs, Technology

A brief history of FileVault

T T Read More

First securing the Home folder in an encrypted sparse disk image, then to whole-volume encryption using CoreStorage, now using T2 and Apple silicon chips.

October 19, 2024 Macs, Technology

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