A major change in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple’s new Apple File System, or APFS. With any luck, you’ll barely notice the change, just as almost no one did earlier this year when Apple updated millions of iOS devices to APFS with iOS 10.3. But let’s unpack what APFS is, why you should care, and what gotchas you might encounter.
A file system is a mechanism for storing files on a hard disk or SSD—it keeps track of where on the drive the pieces that make up each file are located, along with metadata about each file, such as its name, size, creation and modification dates, and so on. You see all this information in the Finder, but since the file system is a level below the Finder, you won’t have to learn anything new when Apple starts using APFS.
- I'm have MacFUSE because I'm using NTFS-3G. NTFS-3G allows me to read and write to NTFS drives. OSX only allows you to read NTFS drives. So my external USB hard drives I can format as NTFS and use with my Mac or PC and not have the 4GB limit of FAT32.
- MacFuse is a framwork that is also required for the ntfs-3g driver to work. This driver allows the mac to read/write ntfs volumes which otherwise are read only when connected to a Mac.
Why is Apple making this switch? In 1985, Apple first developed the Hierarchical File System (HFS) for the Mac, later replacing it with HFS+ in 1998. Although HFS+, now called Mac OS Extended in Disk Utility, has received numerous updates in the last two decades, it wasn’t designed to deal with terabyte-sized drives, solid-state drives based on flash storage, full-disk encryption, or supercomputer-class Macs.
In baisc terms mac fuse is a program that allows one to program for a filesystem that is not naively supported on mac some of the filesystems that people use macfuse-EXT2-EXT3-Pounce (which is a.
That’s where APFS comes in. Being a modern file system, it’s vastly faster than HFS+. For instance, have you ever used File > Get Info to see how much disk space a folder uses? For a folder containing thousands of files, it can take minutes before you see that number. But with APFS, calculating folder sizes becomes nearly instantaneous, as does duplicating a file that’s gigabytes in size. Saving files should also be faster. Swinsian 2 1 11 – music manager and player positions.
APFS is also more resistant to data loss or file corruption due to application crashes, and it keeps your data more secure with advanced backup and encryption capabilities. If you use FileVault to encrypt your drive, APFS will change the underlying encryption mechanism during the upgrade, but everything will look and work just as it always has.
When you install High Sierra on a Mac with an SSD or flash storage, which includes all recent Mac notebooks and many desktop Macs, your drive will be converted to APFS automatically. You cannot opt out of the conversion, and the installation will take a bit longer. However, if your Mac has a hard disk drive or Fusion Drive, it won’t be converted to APFS at this time. (If you’re not sure what sort of storage your Mac has, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab.)
That’s one gotcha, and although there are others, they get pretty geeky and most won’t affect you:
- Macs running OS X 10.11 El Capitan and earlier cannot mount or read volumes formatted as APFS. So don’t format external hard disks or USB flash drives as APFS if you might need to use them with older Macs. However, Macs running High Sierra from APFS-formatted drives work fine with external hard disks still formatted as HFS+.
- Although the High Sierra installer can convert a volume from HFS+ to APFS during installation, you cannot convert an APFS volume back to HFS+ without first erasing it. You’ll have to back up any data on it, format as APFS, and then restore the data.
- We recommend against using old disk repair and recovery software that hasn’t been updated for High Sierra on an APFS-formatted volume.
- Apple’s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on your Mac, doesn’t support read/write to APFS-formatted Mac volumes.
- Volumes formatted as APFS can’t offer share points over the network using AFP and must instead use SMB or NFS.
Apart from the problem of APFS-formatted USB flash drives not being readable by older Macs (or Windows computers), most people shouldn’t run into any problems with APFS—everything it changes is under the hood and will just result in a Mac that’s faster, more reliable, and more secure. And since Apple already quietly transitioned millions of iOS devices to APFS, it’s a good bet that switching millions of Macs to it will go equally smoothly.
With Amit Singh’s release of MacFUSE at Macworld Expo 2007, the Mac now embraces a much broader array of file systems, improving cross-platform compatibility, network connectivity, security, and convenient integration with a variety of online services. In short, MacFUSE promises to let Mac users access foreign file systems – such as NTFS, Flickr, Gmail, or even an RSS feed – as though they’re normal disks in the Finder. To see MacFUSE in action, watch Amit’s video demonstration.
File Systems Are Deep Magic — As a general rule, accessing disks and managing files on them (via partitions and file systems) is considered low-level operating system technology, and restricted from “normal” (non-root) users. In Unix terms, file systems are superuser (root) territory. With one-person systems (including most Mac OS X computers), working with file systems can be more trouble than it’s worth, especially since kernel programming is a great deal more demanding than writing normal (“user-space”) programs. While Mac OS X and Linux offer multiple ways for users to work with file systems, they’re still nowhere near as common or easy to develop as applications.
Is Osxfuse Safe
The FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) project was created to alleviate these problems on Linux. FUSE comes in two parts: a kernel module to handle the privileged operations, and a simple non-kernel API to host plug-in file system modules. FUSE/MacFUSE by itself does nothing – it just provides the kernel plumbing for hosting file systems and the API for its plug-ins. The various FUSE modules provide compatibility with a bewildering wealth of file systems, including sshfs (enabling SFTP servers to be mounted directly on the Desktop), NTFS-3g (providing full read/write access to Windows partitions, as opposed to Tiger’s built-in read-only NTFS support – yes, this includes Boot Camp), and dozens of others.
WARNING: MacFUSE is still very much beta software, so you shouldn’t use it unless you’re prepared for problems. In other words, make sure you have two backups before you begin! That said, reports to date have been consistently positive. Textual 5 1 4 – lightweight irc client. Sparkbox 1 2.
Osxfuse For Mac
The MacFUSE project uses a Mac kernel extension instead of the Linux kernel module, and the same module API as its Linux cousin, so Mac users can take advantage of existing FUSE modules. In addition to the aforementioned sshfs and NTFS, modules tested with MacFUSE include WebDAV, FTP, Beagle, SpotlightFS, and the CryptoFS and EncFS encrypted file systems. Additional modules (not yet tested with MacFUSE) offer access to Sun’s ZFS, music on an iPod, iTunes & iPhoto shares, Flickr, GMail, wikis, blogs, etc.
If you’re intrigued by the concept of mounting remote file systems as disks but not ready to install a beta kernel extension on your Mac, Interarchy may be a better option. Its FTP Disk technology includes bidirectional synchronization, enabling Interarchy to simulate a MacFUSE-style file system mount for FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV (HTTP and HTTPS) servers, appearing on your Desktop just like an AppleShare or Samba file server.
Getting the Goods — Despite having been out for only a couple weeks, MacFUSE has already generated considerable interest – there are several different efforts under way to provide graphical interfaces to MacFUSE and various file system modules. Hopefully it will be possible to use MacFUSE file systems from Apple’s Connect To Server dialog, but Apple doesn’t currently support this.
Macfuse For Mac
MacFUSE Core – comprised of the kernel module, user-space support files, and header files needed for building additional modules – is available in both binary and source code formats (binary is recommended; compiling from source requires Apple’s Xcode Tools, available free from the Apple Developer Connection site). Most FUSE plug-ins currently require compilation by the end user, often with tweaks for differences in MacFUSE, although over time these fixes should get built into the official FUSE plug-ins so they require no special treatment on the Mac. SpotlightFS and sshfs are currently also available as installers; additional plug-ins should follow.