I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.
> I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
One thing I have learned with (current) Apple is to never trust their commitment to support something they're not using. And even be wary for stuff they are using. (in my mind, a core technical difference between Microsoft & Apple is that MS will bend over backwards for backwards compatibility, whereas Apple will drop it as soon as they can, and sometimes sooner still)
They replaced their use of HFS+ with APFS in 2017, so it's had a good run.
I have heard from ex-CoreOS (the Apple org) colleagues is that the organization is run intentionally lean, because the leadership believes that people do their best work under pressure. This leads, among other things, to aggressive YAGNI pruning.
sorry for the non-substantive nit. because we all know what you meant.
YAGNI is about not doing work in advance. it's very confusing to say YAGNI and pruning in the same breath. it's also confusing to call this aggressive since it's been 10 years.
i wouldn't call it dead code pruning either, since the code in question here was actually reachable and used. maybe, unmaintained code pruning?
I don't think APFS was designed or tuned with HDDs in mind, but it will work just fine. Especially for backups where random read/write performance is not important.
I would not recommend using an APFS formatted HDD for Time Machine. It's painfully slow. With my Samsung T7 the hourly Time Machine backups are usually finished after a couple of minutes. Using my older HDD they can easily take 20 minutes to half an hour.
While time machine used to be snappy on HDD it was build out of one of the weirdest little hacks hard links in folders. The new Time Machine might front a similar front end but under the hood its a different beast. You're having to mount snapshots as you move through time.
It's definitely APFS. I've had the pleasure* of HFS+ and APFS on the same external HDD and APFS is horrible. Given it is optimised for solid-state drives[0], it's understandable there'd be some slack but it is absolute horse paste.
(If I could create an encrypted external HFS+ volume, I would but macOS hasn't allowed that for a while as far as my experience goes - it's non-encrypted HFS+ or encrypted APFS.)
My point is that while the old HFS+ based Time Machine was performing ok on spinning disks, the new APFS based TM backups are excruciatingly slow and take ages to finish. I did actually compare both types on the same hard drive and even then the difference was very obvious.
Ok I may be an idiot, but I just have a permanently attached external disk that does Time Machine, what am I missing out on? Why network location? Or are you backing up massive amounts of data? (for me it’s just 2TB)
This is what I do. It's the happy path and works well.
It seems most of the problems with Time Machine happen when you try and run it over SMB. It's not that surprising when you realise what it is doing under that scenario. It creates a virtual disk on the remote and then formats it with APFS. You don't need much to go wrong to corrupt the backup in this scenario.
It's mainly for multiple people in a household to back up to one location, especially if some have laptops that are often not on desks. Those Airport APs used to also let you attach disks for this. You could even do it over a VPN.
MacOS is only Posix like, and does a lot of weird nonstandard things in the background regarding mounting drives/images.
There are restrictions on where things can run, what can run, and what is accessible to the process.
SSHFS is slow, but at least can mount windows/linux/android systems over VPN without issues. Look at what is needed to bring up SSHFS or NTFS support, and you should have a better idea of Apples walled garden policies.
Apple makes information appliances, and not general-purpose computers. Some may disagree, but they usually choose an exception use-case rather than the normal experience of users. =3
They are working on a userspace port, since newer versions of macOS don't/won't allow third-party kernel code ("kexts"). But it's based on Apple's newer FSKit API directly, not macFUSE or FUSE-T.
I just remember Google macfuse, osxfuse, then the new non-Google macfuse never working right for one reason or another. Don't think it was even a kernel vs userspace issue, it's just that the project kept changing ownership and getting broken by OS updates for other reasons, and it was confusing to find help because of the naming.
That would happen around once a year when I used the 2013 AirPort Time Capsule.
It seemed to stop killing itself when I moved to a ZFS backed samba share.
Funnily enough I also kept snapshots enabled because I was expecting TM to bork itself eventually, so I could always rollback to a working state but I don’t remember needing to use that.
I also had a recurring corruption issue using a Windows Server file share.
Before MacOS 27, I was always able to remove the Time Machine destination, replace the corrupted sparse bundle with a fresh empty one, and reconfigure that as the new TM destination. I even made a script for this, so I didn’t have to figure out the terminal commands every time.
Unfortunately the script doesn’t work anymore; it throws ‘error 25’ on my MacOS 27.
What’s weirdest is that, before the corruption, TM backup and restore used to work fine on my MacOS 27. Seemingly the backup functionality works as normal, but setting the TM destination was broken.
What is the issue exactly, your network drops entirely and the sparse bundle disk image gets into some inconsistent state? Cause SMB is definitely not aware of the stripes you're writing for that, and partial file writes are possible too. But I'm a bit surprised if these disk images Apple intentionally chose for networked TM backups don't have some kind of failsafe for this, either at the block layer or the APFS layer.
And personally I've never had networked backups get corrupted, dunno why.
Presumably network drops but that was back before LLMs and it was quite difficult to debug besides a generic "Time Machine needs to recreate your archive/backups" popup
I backup to TrueNAS which configures Samba/ZFS to take a snapshot before each backup. If TM decides to corrupt a backup, I can revert to a snapshot. I've only ever had to do this once in years of operation with several Macs backing up (each to their own share).
Yep, never trust Apple for something they don't rely on to live. For example, don't expect the ecosystem with the Homepod with screen can last for too long. The support will drop and only leave security response if nobody is purchasing.
Well I'm in your boat. Encrypted sparse bundle disk image on an HFS+ volume seems like it should work, if I'm not missing something. You only need CoreStorage for encrypted HFS+.
With macOS 27, I don't know who Apple is trying to outdo?. 27 has been a total disaster for me and my setup at home.
Back when there was a little more rivalry between Microsoft and Apple, Apple would come up with these really cool things to showcase the operating system and make lives easier. Now, I don't know what it is they're trying to prove with this operating system. I also hate the fact that they skinned the whole operating system around a failed hardware product.
I can't immediately find prior warnings that this was coming.
The following technical note from July 22nd says Encrypted HFS+ Volumes won't be supported in macOS *28*, so this seems a bit early...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/125615
And even that was 13 or 14 years after Apple shipped their last computer with a Firewire port - long enough that those computers weren't even supported by macOS 26. Apple dropping support for a largely obsolete technology, which they hadn't used for well over a decade, should hardly come as a great shock.
Apple's Thunderbolt FireWire 800 adapter daisy-chained with their TB2-to-TB3 adapter should work on any modern system with Thunderbolt and FireWire support, as it just presents as a bog-standard PCI FireWire card.
So worst-case, you should be able to access your old drives on a modern Mac by booting from a FireWire-compatible OS (Asahi or older macOS) on an external drive.
People are mentioning Firewire hard-drives in this discussion, but much more significant are the industries where other Firewire devices are still in use: such as high-end film-scanning, music production, video archiving, and medical imaging.
Notice that the common thread here is that Firewire was (and is) predominantly a tool for active CREATIVE functionality. Whereas Apple's current focus is passive CONSUMPTION functionality.
Apple software updates are always a downgrade. It's an opportunity to abuse customers that Apple just can't resist. If you're lucky all they do is break your muscle memory by moving buttons pointlessly.
Gave up on Apple after my MBP is effectively stuck in High Sierra and can't run anything modern, no thanks to the App Store removing older versions of software.
Not GP, but: I had replaced the battery on my M1 Max 6mo ago with an aftermarket part. On MacOS 26 that routinely gave about 5 hours of coding/browsing/active screen time (no audio or massive CPU load other than unit test runs).
Anecdotally, after updating to MacOS 27 2mo ago that time has been reduced by between a third and a half, doing the same kind of daily work on the exact same project, without major new apps installed or new always-open browser tabs.
I don’t know if it’s the OS’s fault directly or the fault of an app I use that interacts poorly with the new OS’s power management, but either one is damning. I’m not doing anything particularly weird.
I did not. The fact that data migration in-place isn’t automatic with downgrades (that’s still true, right? You have to do a clean install?) deters me, since I’d have to find a couple hours to set my things back up.
I've replaced the battery earlier this year. With Sequoia I get about 14 hours of use (browsing with firefox, emails with thunderbird, youtube, spotify, apple pages and numbers). Last year when I "downgraded" to tahoe, my battery life was effectively halfed and returned to normal when I upgraded back to Sequoia. Same thing is true with GG this year.
It's the iOSsification of macOS. Apparently, newer macBooks will now have touchscreen too ... once iPad OS and macOS are fully merged into OneMacOStoRuleThemAll, they'll finally lock down the bootloader on all Macs (why do you want to install anything else other an Apple OS?) and force all software install only through the App Store.
Really? Can you upgrade your RAM and SSD on the new Macs? Do non-Apple OS run on the newer Macs (without being crippled in their ability to utilize the hardware), like they could on Intel Macs? Can you distribute software for Mac platform without Apple as an intermediary, outside the App Store? Can you create new kernel extensions / system software for macOS without Apple as an intermediary? (The answer to all that is No - your digital computing rights have been slowly taken away on Apple hardwares, for a while now).
- Can you upgrade your RAM and SSD on the new Macs?
No.
- Do non-Apple OS run on the newer Macs (without being crippled in their ability to utilize the hardware), like they could on Intel Macs?
No. Asahi Linux runs crippled on ARM Macs because the developers are still trying to reverse engineer the SoC, thus providing a sub-par experience. (It's not usable yet, but Asahi Linux runs on M3 Macs now - https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/01/27/its-not-usable-ye... ). Apple can easily fix this by providing the device specifications and / or device drivers for its SoCs but it won't. Note that Linux (or Windows or xBSDs) have no such issues on most Intel Macs and thus offer a much pleasant experience than on ARM Macs.
- Can you distribute software for Mac platform without Apple as an intermediary, outside the App Store?
No, if you don't pay Apple to sign and notarize your app, Apple intentionally makes distributing apps outside the App Store a sub-par experience with deceptive design practices and messages deliberately designed to dissuade the average user from installing software from outside the App Store. If you do not have the technical know how, you cannot install apps from outside the App Store without giving into Apple's extortion and paying money to Apple.
- Can you create new kernel extensions / system software for macOS without Apple as an intermediary?
No. System programs now need special entitlements (aka permission) from Apple to run on macOS. System developers that used to make custom application firewall and virtualisation software, for example, have already been coerced by Apple to use Apple's subpar built-in OS solution, killing innovation in these areas on the Mac platform.
The author has another recent post from Oct 30 wherein DNS stops working on their machine every week or two. Unsetting/resetting the servers fixes it. I can't imagine daily driving a workstation with flaky DNS.
According to the Wikipedia article about CoreStorage, it seems like the primary/only use case was Fusion drives (hybrid SSD/HDD hardware).
The article says “It renders your expensive storage hardware completely useless.” but I’m really curious what that hardware could actually be. This seems like a pretty dead technology.
CoreStorage was also used for HFS+ formatted and encrypted external storage like Time Machine backups. If you have any of those in your archive you might not be able to read them in the future.
I've gotta agree. I'm not sure what expensive storage hardware would be both relevant today and unable to migrate off CoreStorage. For example, my most expensive storage is a NAS with an iSCSI target, and it couldn't care less what blocks I write to it. If I had a CoreStorage setup on it, I could migrate the data to a new target and then reuse that space for something else. The hardware wouldn't mind, or even know, that I'd changed what's on it.
You mentioned old, obsolete Fusion drives. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else where that'd matter, so you're probably right about that. AFAIK you can reformat those to use something other than CoreStorage if you're actually stuck using those boat anchors.
Sidebar, but as an end user, I remain annoyed that there isn't seemingly something that's a worthy successor to fusion drives.
Like I have an Unraid box with dual NVMe (RAID1) as the "cache" drive and a bunch of spinning disks as the "array", but it's also very manual, like torrents get downloaded first to cache and then a nightly job syncs them to the array. Feels like a real missed opportunity to not be able to have this kind of config transparently managed.
The successor is SSDs, and I think for what Apple was using fusion drives for they are worthy successors.
The 2.5” form factor also took up a ton of space in a laptop form factor.
With my NAS box (TrueNAS ZFS) I don’t bother with a cache. I struggle to justify the cost/benefit ratio. The sustained write speed of a 3.5” disk isn’t so bad for the most common NAS use cases.
If I could go back to 2024 I think I’d use a m.2 2280 array for my NAS just because my present tense brain would think it was cheap. I don’t even hoard that much content so 4-8TB would be fine.
From a pure cost point of view, I think it still makes sense to me to split the load, like 500GB of NVMe covers your containers and apps and stuff, but then 10-20TB of spinning storage is fairly achievable with redundancy, whereas that would cost a fortune to do as all solid state.
Overall I'm happy enough with Unraid for the moment, but I will definitely check in on bcachefs-based solutions when I'm next considering a rebuild/upgrade.
I have one of those in an ageing late 2009 27" iMac running Linux. It is a Seagate ST2000DX001-1CM1, a 2TB "SSHD" which comes down to having 8 GB of NAND storage bolted on to a conventional 2TB drive. It doesn't need any special driver to do its thing so I wonder what that CoreStorage bit is supposed to be about.
Did you install that SSHD as an aftermarket upgrade? I thought the Fusion Drive configurations shipped by Apple used normal hard drives and separate SSDs and were purely software-managed (and also used much more than 8GB of flash).
You're probably wrong. The User Manual for Seagate ST2000DX001 has a revision history stating its first version was published in 2013. That drive was probably not being installed by Apple in the factory four years earlier. Apple didn't introduce "Fusion Drive" branding until 2012. The 2009 iMac models were discontinued in 2010. Nothing you're saying adds up.
Apple sold iMacs for many years that had a completely separate SSD and HDD, and CoreStorage was used to combine them into a single block device which was then partitioned and formatted as HFS+ or APFS.
They use APFS, which supports subvolumes and snapshots natively.
A default install of macOS uses APFS subvolumes for the base operating system (which is immutable, and uses snapshots for updates), the user's data, and swap.
Ah weird, I'm positive I had APFS under corestorage at some point (having to modify stuff with 'diskutil corestorage'). Somewhere around the time of the auto migrations to APFS.
But does the user still have the same agency over this configuration? In general this was really why I moved away from Mac in the end. Apple is hiding the technical underpinnings more and more. I always hated not being able to just make a 'dd' image of my computer and just blast it to another mac or even a VM.
In the beginning OS X was a great combo of a POSIX OS with a good UI, but lately it's become too much iOS for my liking. And I never liked the opinionated UI, though in the early days I could get away with it because Apple's opinions were similar to my own. These days they aren't so in the end I moved to KDE. Every consecutive macOS release felt like a step back.
It doesn't really do everything that a real LVM does though. This was used to support those annoyingly bad Fusion Drives. They dropped them around 2020 I think.
I posted ~7 months ago about my decision to use HFS+ for backups, and had a couple skeptical replies. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317123)
I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.
Guess I'll figure out SuperDuper or Carbon Copy.
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