A survey of support for APFS, HFS+, FAT and ExFAT, NTFS, ZFS, Linux file systems, and MacFUSE with its potential for file systems running in user-space.
HFS+
Trim enables an SSD to erase pages of unused memory so they’re ready for reuse. It saves time, and greatly improves write performance. How to the best out of Trim.
How APFS is the first Mac native file system to have true inodes and inode numbers. What they are, and how you can use them in volume groups and different types of file link.
When the numbers simply don’t add up. How some extended attributes may be included in quoted file sizes, but others are ignored, and Sequoia hasn’t really changed this since Classic Mac OS of 25 years ago.
A brief start with MFS for 400 KB floppies, followed by HFS intended for the first hard disks, upgraded to HFS+ in 1988, and followed in 2017 by APFS for all the OSes.
How read-write disk images and those used in Apple silicon virtual machines use sparse file format to save space on disk.
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.
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.
When do sparse files explode to full size, and how could you preserve them in transit? Can you copy clones or snapshots? How to preserve extended attributes?
APFS or HFS+? Which can Time Machine back up to? What about hard disks? Which format for use on PCs? And which are supported by Disk Utility now?
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