<story><title>A brief history of APFS (2022)</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2022/04/01/a-brief-history-of-apfs-in-honour-of-its-fifth-birthday/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>risho</author><text>I never really used anything in the apple ecosystem until the m1 came out. It was such an interesting device that I wound up picking it up.&lt;p&gt;I was reading about macos&amp;#x27; history with filesystems a while back and apparently they were considering switching to zfs at some point but instead decided to design apfs as their own in house next gen filesystem. In my experience with it it seems to lack almost all of the features that would have made zfs interesting. One of the most obvious usecases would be for something like time machine. I have a parallels virtual machine that is hundreds of gigabytes in size and as far as I can tell that each time you modify even a single byte in that vm it will need to backup the entire file all over again. not only is this infeasible in the amount of space it would require it&amp;#x27;s also infeasible in that every time I do a backup i would need to spend the time transfering the whole thing all over again. this is also one of the biggest problems that next gen filesystems were designed to solve. is it really the case that apple&amp;#x27;s next generation filesystem doesn&amp;#x27;t support snapshots or block level replication when one of their most obvious usecases for it would be time machine backups?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ribit</author><text>APFS does have snapshots and at least the local TM backups heavily use them (it takes a fraction of a second to perform a local TM backup). TM backups to disk also seem to be organised as snapshots and have become much much faster in the recent macOS versions, so I don&amp;#x27;t think it does only copy changed blocks (but I can&amp;#x27;t be sure).&lt;p&gt;What I would love for APFS to have thought is block-level deduplication. Seems like an obvious fit for an SSD-optimized COW system anyway, surprised they haven&amp;#x27;t implemented it.</text></comment>
<story><title>A brief history of APFS (2022)</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2022/04/01/a-brief-history-of-apfs-in-honour-of-its-fifth-birthday/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>risho</author><text>I never really used anything in the apple ecosystem until the m1 came out. It was such an interesting device that I wound up picking it up.&lt;p&gt;I was reading about macos&amp;#x27; history with filesystems a while back and apparently they were considering switching to zfs at some point but instead decided to design apfs as their own in house next gen filesystem. In my experience with it it seems to lack almost all of the features that would have made zfs interesting. One of the most obvious usecases would be for something like time machine. I have a parallels virtual machine that is hundreds of gigabytes in size and as far as I can tell that each time you modify even a single byte in that vm it will need to backup the entire file all over again. not only is this infeasible in the amount of space it would require it&amp;#x27;s also infeasible in that every time I do a backup i would need to spend the time transfering the whole thing all over again. this is also one of the biggest problems that next gen filesystems were designed to solve. is it really the case that apple&amp;#x27;s next generation filesystem doesn&amp;#x27;t support snapshots or block level replication when one of their most obvious usecases for it would be time machine backups?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalleboo</author><text>It made a lot of sense for Apple to adopt ZFS back when they were shipping spinning rust hard disks and PowerMacs had room for multiple drives, but now that they&amp;#x27;re shipping soldered-in integrated flash drives with their own storage controller in the SoC, it probably makes more sense to them to put features like encryption and  error correction in their storage controller rather than the file system, and then have a file system which is far more lightweight (so they can ship the same FS on a wristwatch as on a 20-core Mac).&lt;p&gt;APFS does have snapshots but I don&amp;#x27;t think it has replication.&lt;p&gt;Time Machine is so bad and has seen so little work, I feel like Apple really wants to drop it and move everyone to iCloud subscriptions instead. And yet they still don&amp;#x27;t have a cloud backup product, which is even stranger.</text></comment>