APFS: What it is and What Advantages it Has over HFS +

Apple‘s file system on Mac has always received a lot of criticism from experts. But this changed from macOS 10.13 with the arrival of the APFS system, which has given a new air to file management to offer a much faster read and write speed. In this article we discuss all the benefits of this new file system at Apple.

Background

The Apple File System (APFS) began to be implemented in the Mac operating system as of macOS 10.13, being presented at the Developers Conference. This file systems came to replace the veteran HFS + that has accompanied users for many generations. There are many advantages that the APFS system includes and that has rejuvenated many older computers by improving the reading speed and encryption of files. This is because full disk encryption can be done natively.

APFS: What it is and What Advantages it Has over HFS +

APFS Advantages

Ability to manage a large volume of files

Generally speaking, you should know that the APFS file system uses 64-bit inode numbers in order to offer much more secure storage. This allows, among other things, more than 9 quintillion files to be supported on a single volume. Obviously this is not very interesting for basic users, but at a professional level it is a great advance to manage a large volume of files as you might imagine.

Better encryption

File security is a very good feature of APFS over other similar systems. This is because special encryption is natively used using the AES-XTS or AES-CBS algorithms so as to no longer rely on the kernel. This, in addition to improving data encryption in macOS, opens the door to the unification of the operating systems of different devices. Obviously this fact is planted for the future.

There are several options that can be found to be able to encrypt the data in the most secure way through the encryption of a key or multi-key.

Ease of partitioning

Partitions are becoming more common. The users of ‘on foot’ we use them mainly to be able to carry out an installation of Windows with the aim of having access to a multi-software team. But there is another great part of the users who opt to make partitions with the aim of making tests without corrupting a main partition where the main data is housed. With APFS, Apple has allowed to create a whole series of partitions where the same space used in storage is shared at all times.

Clone creation

Through clones, macOS will be able to do file copying in a very efficient way. This is possible because these files that are cloned will be saved as deltas and will reduce the storage required for future revisions, making it take up less space on the hard disk. This is an operation that has been polished and optimized to achieve better performance from hard drives.

ssd macbook

Security against errors

There are many errors that can occur that end up corrupting a hard disk and its metadata. This is undoubtedly one of the great fears that can be had when storing data on a disk. This is why APFS has integrated an accident protection system that will prevent metadata corruption. This is accomplished by overwriting the existing metadata records instead to write an entirely new record. In addition, to ensure the integrity of this data, checksums are used.

In conclusion, there are many advantages that have been included in this new file system that is present in macOS. Although it must be remembered that it is highly recommended to use it on SSD, it can also be applied on HDD disks, although this implies a lower data transfer speed.

Apple continues to work at the development level to improve these evolving file systems. Although they started with something of low quality, little by little he has worked on this new system that has undoubtedly ended up liking him much more.