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Questions tagged [apfs]

Apple File System (APFS) is a proprietary file system for macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS, developed and deployed by Apple Inc. It aims to fix core problems of HFS+ (also called Mac OS Extended), APFS's predecessor on these operating systems. Apple File System is optimized for flash and solid-state drive storage, with a primary focus on encryption.

Apple File System (APFS) is a proprietary file system for macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS, developed and deployed by Apple Inc.

49 questions
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How to mount APFS on Linux or Windows?

Is there any way to mount APFS partition read only or read/write on Linux or Windows?
Vahid
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9
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2 answers

How to restore from a sealed APFS volume when restore fails "because it has a broken seal"?

I have been researching this for many hours over the last week. A description of my research effort is at the end of this post. Disk Utility will not restore an APFS volume "because it has a broken seal," but the volume appears to be sealed. The…
timeSmith
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3 answers

How to find firmlinks

macOS Catalina introduces "firmlinks" to the APFS filesystem. Is there a way via a CLI tool to determine whether /Users is a firmlink and where it is firmlinking to? I'm looking for something similar to the readlink command for symlinks.
michaelt
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7
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1 answer

How to create a firm link in latest APFS

I'm running the macOS beta for Catalina (10.15) and I'm trying to find out how to create a firm link. (Not a hard link, soft link, alias or anything like that.) The WWDC keynote mentions a new feature referred to as firm links but I can't seem to…
der_michael
  • 138
7
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Determining status of cloned file on APFS

Apple is now using APFS across several product lines, including macOS. This new filesystem has some nice features for minimizing how much actual disk space is consumed, such as sparse file support and COW clones similar to BSD's clonefile(). I've…
petiepooo
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6
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3 answers

How do I resize an APFS Volume to reclaim all space inside its container?

I'm running a MacPro 5,1 on MacOS 10.14.6 with a 500gb Samsung SSD as my boot/host drive. I recently ran out of space on my 500gb ssd so I speced an identical 1tb ssd. A clean reinstall is not an option for me so I used clonezilla to do a block copy…
Jonathan Baxter
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Is it possible to create a firmlink on the latest version of macOS Catalina?

synthetic.conf creates empty, mountable directories and symlinks, not firmlinks. While I do know you can create another volume inside the APFS container and use synthetic.conf to provide me with a mountpoint, this is not what this question is…
Yan Minari
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4
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1 answer

My Apple APFS partition is entirely full, and now I can't delete anything anymore. How do I fix this?

APFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, which means that any modification including deletions require writing new metadata, not just changing existing metadata. The new metadata requires free space. At least on OSX Mojave that means that if there is no…
JanKanis
  • 287
3
votes
1 answer

How to format a disk with 2 APFS containers with Disk Utility

I have a MacBook Pro running High Sierra with an internal disk made of 2 volumes HFS+, case sensitive and encrypted: I would like to switch to 2 APFS containers, case sensitive and encrypted. I am able to erase the internal disk and create the 1st…
athena
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1 answer

How to load MacOS from an APFS partition using GRUB2?

This is a Apple machine, not a Hackintosh. Before Apple switched to APFS, you could put this inside a menu entry in GRUB: set root=(your OS X partition) chainloader /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi But that doesn't work with APFS, as GRUB…
whoKnows
  • 151
3
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1 answer

Rsync from Mac OS to synology with btrfs having issues with file and directories that contain umlauts and similar characters

I want to copy a folder from my local Mac (Catalina with APFS) to my Synology (btrfs filesystem) on my local network. And all files that have an umlaut in it (ö,ä,ü,....) gets in trouble somehow. First he is deleting the file in the destination and…
TomBlue
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3
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1 answer

Mac Pro 5,1 firmware update for booting APFS

When High Sierra came out, I opted to not update my filesystem version, out of caution. Now that it’s been out for a while, and my MacBook Pro has had no issues, I’d like to upgrade my MacBook Pro 5,1 to APFS. I naively tried by booting into…
Dylan McNamee
  • 511
3
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0 answers

APFS encrypted sparsebundle won't fully compact

I have an APFS encrypted sparsebundle saved on my HD. It is not a time machine backup, rather something I created and maintain manually. On occasion I perform an hdiutil compact to reclaim HD space. High Sierra (10.13.6) Finder reports that the…
psoft
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3
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0 answers

How do I mount a raw APFS filesystem from the commandline on macOS?

Creating a raw image with an APFS filesystem in it is pretty straight-forward: $ hdiutil create -megabytes 1 -layout NONE -fs apfs -volname unicode unicode.dmg created: /Users/daniel/test/apfs/unicode.dmg Now I want to put files in it for a…
Hakanai
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How to fix APFS errors that Disk First Aid isn't fixing? ("descendants of dir-stats object is greater than expected")

This is occurring on an M1 MacBook Pro 2021, macOS Sequoia 15.1.1. I've seen some warnings/errors running disk first aid through Disk Utility. I see the same errors running it from the command line. I run this on the data partition: fsck_apfs -n -l…
John Tweed
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