Sunday, October 1, 2017

The Curiosity of APFS, the New Apple File System for macOS High Sierra

From the reading at the time a week ago when macOS High Sierra was released, I gleaned some mixed material but the gist overall was that APFS is present in High Sierra but don't turn it on yet.  Maybe I mixed up some publication dates since advisories to defer activating APFS may have gone out to the Beta audience which has been doing the field testing all along.  In any case, the advisory was not correct.

APFS is active in the system from the moment you boot into High Sierra.  To validate that for yourself, launch Disk Utility and select your internal SDD (i.e. flash drive).  That will show specifically the drive is active under APFS.


It may be any confusion arose in others the same way as with me since there was no conversion required.  There's been no activity so there's the immediate question.  When the new file system changes so much, how is it possible the files do not apparently change at all.  I'll leave that to the interested student or relentless Apple nuthead since I'm curious but not enough to do the research.


Maybe some of you geezers know of IBM's DA or Direct Access datasets / files and it was a special place in Hell's programming center which came up with that one as there wasn't any conversion of those DA datasets which would not inflict pain.  The contrast does bring up a measure of ooh wow but I'm content to leave it at that.


In other words, I apologize for my own confusion when relating how things went with the installation since the result was incorrect.  Since then I've validated for myself whether APFS is present and it definitely is live with High Sierra.


There's another update with High Sierra and the High-Performance video codec.  That one was seen by reviewers as probably not suitable for home videographers.  The update is Apple has now released their latest version of iMovie and it fully exploits the new code.  It is not supported in Final Cut Pro or not yet but iMovie is right on it.

Researching the effectiveness of the MP.5 format is up to the interested student but there are large potentially-significant benefits so it's worthy of the research.


That will about do it for Ithaka and High Sierra.  I'm damn glad it's here and no need to itemize anything since you have seen it already.  For anything more, I'll leave it to the Big Dawgs and I'll continue doing what I do

Zen Yogi:  and without the blasted autoplay videos

Finest kind of way, Yogi.

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