With the release of iOS 10.3 to the general public, millions of devices will be upgraded to use Apple’s new file system, APFS, in what is a bold, yet not risk-free move according to several commentators.
With the release of iOS 10.3 to the general public, millions of devices will be upgraded to use Apple’s new file system , APFS , in what is a bold, yet not risk-free move according to several commentators.
Presented at the last WWDC and covered by InfoQ at the time, APFS is the replacement for the almost 20 year old HFS+ file system that was introduced with Mac OS 8.1, sporting a number of features that put it in the same category as ZFS and HAMMER , including advanced support for encryption, copy-on-write, flexible partitioning, snapshots, atomic saves, and more.
As many developers who had previously installed iOS 10.3 beta versions, users installing the official 10.3 release on their devices have been experiencing a rather lengthy upgrade process , seemingly due to the file system conversion, but no reports of any significant issues are known at the time of writing.
Interestingly, this is APFS official debut, since it has been previously available on macOS Sierra only as a developer preview , and with a number of limitations including the impossibility of using an APFS-formatted disk as a startup disk.
