I made various backups using both Time Machine and my own Mac Backup Guru before I started. I assumed there were already some errors in the existing HFS+ filesystem. Being a systems programmer it has had a lot of hard resets, and it has been a long time since I formatted and clean reinstalled. I then took the plunge and ran the installer – again with reservations. So, before installing 10.13, I started off by googling for any problems experienced by people installing and upgrading filesystems during the process using the public betas. Since the OS does most of the file manipulation, and programmers interact with the filesystem through high level library calls, it seemed natural that converting the filesystem would be more standardized. When Apple changed the filesystem of all upgraded iOS devices from HFS+ to APFS with flawless execution I was impressed, but assumed it was due to iOS being a lot more restrictive about files in general. Take a look at the tone (which, despite my own tone being different to, I simultaneously agree with) of a competitor’s backup software blog post to see what tends to run through an engineer’s mind when it relates to such a complex change. It’s also generally accepted that any conversion from one filesystem to another will never be 100% safe. It is generally considered industry knowledge that it takes 10 years to properly develop a filesystem. I also had a lot of reservations about switching up the filesystem so boldly. I’m still waiting for that despite the fact that, impressively, APFS has already been reverse engineered. But it hasn’t, even now when the golden master candidates of the OS have been released. I was hoping that some updated information would be released. My response was mostly due to the fact that the only official APFS documentation and code samples are just stubs, written back when APFS was in alpha. With that in mind I left it until the last minute and only started working on it a few days ago, which was only about a week before the public release of macOS 10.13, which will convert SSD’s to from HFS+ to APFS during the installation. Addressing all the nuances is harder than it sounds. Getting basic backup software going is pretty trivial. As in, basically totally rewriting it, since the first version of it took about a thousand hours itself. When it was originally announced that Apple would be switching to a modern filesystem from HFS+ (based upon HFS which is more than 30 years old) my initial reaction was to expect roughly one thousand hours of work in order to get Mac Backup Guru working with it effectively.
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