Details of what happens when an APFS (Encrypted) volume is mounted, when mounting a Time Machine snapshot, unmounting a volume, and loading a Cryptex.
file system
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?
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.
How APFS containers and volumes work. What hard links, clones and sparse files are, and when they break down.
ResEdit changed what was in the resource fork. With Mac OS X, Apple moved away from forks to extended attributes, now used for quarantine flags and more.
Using version numbers, it’s possible to track changes in critical sub-systems like APFS within macOS. According to those, APFS was updated twice while Catalina was in security-only maintenance. Why?
File data stored towards the periphery of the disk is read and written nearly twice as fast as that near the centre. How to take advantage of this.
Which is faster with a hard disk: using APFS or sticking with HFS+? Are there any differences in their performance on SSDs?
One likely cause of vanishing free space are large snapshots. So how can you tell why a snapshot is large, and how can you avoid it?
Which should you use, and what are their strengths and drawbacks? Symbolic links, hard links, aliases and bookmarks explained – oh, and a mention of firmlinks too.
The Eclectic Light Company 