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.
AceJohnny2 3 days ago [-]
> 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.
AceJohnny2 3 days ago [-]
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.
jiveturkey 2 days ago [-]
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?
natch 2 days ago [-]
Pruning of proposed features maybe?
jiveturkey 20 hours ago [-]
well that would be YAGNI wouldn't it? this is about removal of an existing feature, not a proposed feature.
unsloppable 3 days ago [-]
Rosetta..
tonyedgecombe 2 days ago [-]
Is dead in next year's release (apart from a handful of exceptions).
mrpippy 3 days ago [-]
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.
MilaM 3 days ago [-]
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.
outofpaper 3 days ago [-]
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.
fl0id 3 days ago [-]
are you sure that is because of apfs? hdds are usually much slower, no?
zimpenfish 3 days ago [-]
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.
3 days ago [-]
hoherd 2 days ago [-]
This might be a blessing in disguise for you. The silent data rot of HFS+ is what pushed me to ZFS. I would never go back to HFS+.
stingraycharles 3 days ago [-]
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)
Marsymars 3 days ago [-]
Oh right — I could do a local HFS+ non-encrypted disk with encrypted Time Machine (I assume) — that just slipped my mind.
tonyedgecombe 2 days ago [-]
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.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 2 days ago [-]
I so miss these Airport APs, I really don’t understand why the product line was cancelled, it was perfect.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
Same, I still have one for random purposes. Still the easiest and most polished router/AP, has lots of features.
root9876 3 days ago [-]
I switched to Borg on Linux server from local attached Time Machine disk after once I went to a long trip and forgot the disk at home.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
Wait, you can do encrypted backup to a network location but not to HFS+? What if the network location is just your own Mac?
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
I could, but I don't want to make my wife figure that out if I get hit by a bus.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
I had to cmd+f "FUSE" all over the place first, thank goodness 0 matches
isityettime 2 days ago [-]
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.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
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.
2 days ago [-]
lakeviewterrace 3 days ago [-]
> encrypted Time Machine to a network location
this has a bonus feature where it will slowly corrupt itself over time and offer to start a completely new backup instead.
yangm97 2 days ago [-]
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.
nijave 2 days ago [-]
Eh, mine was always on zfs first on FreeNAS then Ubuntu and it didn't seem to help.
The only thing that definitely made it worse was smb over openvpn. It'd corrupt itself every couple months instead of once or twice a year.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
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.
yangm97 20 hours ago [-]
Was that before or after they increased the sparesebundle band size and switched to APFS?
I suppose HFS+ backups were more finicky over the network as well.
themanualstates 2 days ago [-]
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.
js2 2 days ago [-]
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).
thfuran 3 days ago [-]
Sometimes it's pretty quick.
mistrial9 2 days ago [-]
to go forward, you must backup
1over137 2 days ago [-]
>It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS
Be happy they let you backup to HDDs at all. :) They don't sell HDDs, so I'm half amazed they still work whatsoever.
pinyen_cheng 2 days ago [-]
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.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
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+.
qmr 3 days ago [-]
ZFS
someonehere 3 days ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 2 days ago [-]
I always wait until the new year before I upgrade, I guess this is why I don't seem to have any major problems with it.
zombot 2 days ago [-]
I think they're trying to be even shittier than Microslop.
lakeviewterrace 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
SoftTalker 2 days ago [-]
> I remember when Macs used to ship with an encyclopedia preloaded.
That came from NeXT IIRC.
lakeviewterrace 2 days ago [-]
you're thinking of Dictionary.app.
thin_carapace 3 days ago [-]
uncouth expression , valid point , purpose of a computer is still a tool , we the public r no longer wielders & are wielded instead
lakeviewterrace 3 days ago [-]
you will operate it for approved uses only — the days of the 'personal' computer are over.
the future of macOS is the hospital check-in desk in Idiocracy.
supersimpleguy 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
cannonpalms 3 days ago [-]
Careful, an SNL monologue like that may get you cancelled!!
AceJohnny2 3 days ago [-]
FWIW, this is listed as deprecated in the Release Notes:
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
hmartin 3 days ago [-]
Also dropped support for FireWire drives, as I just found out the hard way.
traceroute66 3 days ago [-]
> Also dropped support for FireWire drives, as I just found out the hard way.
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.
jasomill 3 days ago [-]
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.
conradev 3 days ago [-]
You used to be able to chain three adapters:
Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2
Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800
FireWire 800 to FireWire 400
to plug a modern Mac into an iMac G4 in Target Disk Mode
Now you need to add another layer: virtualizing old macOS on a modern Mac
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
But you can still use the original 2005 iMac G5 remote with a new Apple TV
duskwuff 2 days ago [-]
Is it specifically supported, or does it only "work" inasmuch as the Apple TV can be programmed to respond to most IR remotes?
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
It works out of the box, you don't need to make the Apple TV learn it
RulerOf 3 days ago [-]
I had one plugged into the FW800 port of my Cinema Display.
Only really used it as a scratch drive for junk but it was still handy.
hmartin 2 days ago [-]
It is actually shocking to no longer be able to access my data with literally no warning.
As in, not even a dialog saying "hey this drive isn't support anymore"... just... nothing.
What exactly is Apple gaining by dropping a (presumably) super stable driver??
Nice that you can dismiss this as "largely obsolete technology" tho.
2 days ago [-]
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
I'd be annoyed. This stuff is usually not a big deal by itself but becomes death by a thousand cuts. Every OS update breaks something.
hmartin 2 days ago [-]
Yes, thanks for the correction. I skipped 26 but could no longer hold out :)
conradfr 3 days ago [-]
Ah yes 2025, the ancient times.
phony-account 2 days ago [-]
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.
flanz_10 3 days ago [-]
did you go from 25 to 27?
reaperducer 3 days ago [-]
Also dropped support for FireWire drives, as I just found out the hard way.
Well, I guess I can finally throw out all those FireWire cables I have "just in case."
Fortunately, my FireWire drives also support other interfaces, though far more slowly.
lproven 2 days ago [-]
Stick them on eBay or at least Freecycle. They are getting hard to find now.
For 2 elderly HP Microservers I need eSATA caddies, and those I cannot find at all anywhere.
washadjeffmad 2 days ago [-]
Ah. Mine died a few years ago and I just got rid of them, or else I'd have shared.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
It's kinda wild how long external HDDs, not even SSDs, were bottlenecking themselves on USB 2. I don't get why they didn't just use eSATA.
exabrial 3 days ago [-]
MacOs 27 is a disaster. All of the sudden, I have 35% of a computer left to do any kind of work.
R1D3R 3 days ago [-]
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.
thewileyone 3 days ago [-]
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.
lproven 2 days ago [-]
OCLP is a lifeline and works well. After I finally bit the bullet, my iMac is faster than it was before.
drooopy 3 days ago [-]
Among other signs of awfulness, macOS 27 (and 26 before it) half the battery life of my M1 Air, forcing me to stay on Sequoia for a 2nd year.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
zbentley 3 days ago [-]
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.
Velocifyer 3 days ago [-]
Did you try downgrading?
zbentley 1 days ago [-]
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.
drooopy 3 days ago [-]
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.
3 days ago [-]
icedchai 3 days ago [-]
26 felt like more of a disaster than 27! I waited about 8 months to upgrade to 26, and upgraded to 27 right away.
otterley 3 days ago [-]
What does that mean?
sys_64738 3 days ago [-]
Maybe referring to the Apple Superintelligence being auto-added to macOS 27.
varispeed 3 days ago [-]
I'll wait for Apple Supremeintelligence in macOS 29
thisislife2 3 days ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 2 days ago [-]
People have been complaining about this for years and it hasn't happened.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
Since Lion, yes. The closest we got was SIP, which can be disabled but programs can tell. That's significant but still very far from locked-down.
thisislife2 2 days ago [-]
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).
That’s a long way from locking down the bootloader the go was talking about.
bigyabai 2 days ago [-]
Can you imagine if people said this about political catastrophe?
"Yes, war with Iran has been threatened many times but we can rest assured it will never happen because nobody has done it before."
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
varispeed 3 days ago [-]
I upgraded and this system is a dumpster fire. Lags, random crashes, performance issues, random CPU spikes...
accrual 3 days ago [-]
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.
There's a 0% chance I update to this unless it's the very last patch, and even then probably not
p0w3n3d 2 days ago [-]
tar|crypt then
whatever1 3 days ago [-]
Why do people try to force macOS things that it does not like to do? macOS does not like not apple hardware, period.
For backups use a NAS. You can find from completely plug and play options to bring your own machine ones.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
"Not Apple hardware" meaning an external disk? It's not like the NAS is Apple either. They don't sell NAS or external disks anymore.
throwaway27448 3 days ago [-]
For those of you who have never heard of this, it's macos's LVM. Why they didn't just refer to it as LVM is beyond me.
duskwuff 3 days ago [-]
> Why they didn't just refer to it as LVM is beyond me.
Because it isn't LVM, and giving it the same name as another similar-but-distinct technology would just make matters more confusing.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
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.
MilaM 3 days ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 3 days ago [-]
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.
mikepurvis 3 days ago [-]
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.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
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.
hagbard_c 3 days ago [-]
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.
wtallis 3 days ago [-]
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).
hagbard_c 22 hours ago [-]
No, this is the drive the machine came with from the factory.
wtallis 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mrpippy 3 days ago [-]
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.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
You could also do this to your own SSD and HDD, though probably only a good idea with internal ones like in a Mac Pro
throwaway27448 3 days ago [-]
Does it not manage logical volumes?
wolvoleo 2 days ago [-]
Yes it does. It's basically lvm for Mac. I wonder what they do now. Do they go back to old style fixed volumes?
duskwuff 2 days ago [-]
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.
wolvoleo 2 days ago [-]
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.
sysguest 3 days ago [-]
...like route 53? which is "dns configuration, but fancier"
zamadatix 3 days ago [-]
AFAIK "Route 53" was a net new name for such a product?
vondur 3 days ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 3 days ago [-]
> It doesn't really do everything that a real LVM does though.
It manages logical volumes. Any quibbling is a matter of degree.
3 days ago [-]
jon128 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
GrifMD 3 days ago [-]
Darling, no one is going to take your grievances seriously when you speak like that.
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.
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.
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?
(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.)
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/seca6147599e/...
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.
https://www.openzfsonosx.org/
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
https://rclone.org/install/
this has a bonus feature where it will slowly corrupt itself over time and offer to start a completely new backup instead.
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.
The only thing that definitely made it worse was smb over openvpn. It'd corrupt itself every couple months instead of once or twice a year.
And personally I've never had networked backups get corrupted, dunno why.
I suppose HFS+ backups were more finicky over the network as well.
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.
Be happy they let you backup to HDDs at all. :) They don't sell HDDs, so I'm half amazed they still work whatsoever.
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.
That came from NeXT IIRC.
the future of macOS is the hospital check-in desk in Idiocracy.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... (Search for CoreStorage; their fragment links are hilariously broken)
The premier 3rd Party technical blog Eclectic Light talked about it in June: https://eclecticlight.co/2026/06/17/what-to-do-with-your-enc...
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
Erm... it was dropped in macOS 26 back in 2025 ?
https://www.techspot.com/news/108394-usb-killer-dead-apple-d...
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.
Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 FireWire 800 to FireWire 400
to plug a modern Mac into an iMac G4 in Target Disk Mode
Now you need to add another layer: virtualizing old macOS on a modern Mac
Only really used it as a scratch drive for junk but it was still handy.
As in, not even a dialog saying "hey this drive isn't support anymore"... just... nothing.
What exactly is Apple gaining by dropping a (presumably) super stable driver??
Nice that you can dismiss this as "largely obsolete technology" tho.
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.
Well, I guess I can finally throw out all those FireWire cables I have "just in case."
Fortunately, my FireWire drives also support other interfaces, though far more slowly.
For 2 elderly HP Microservers I need eSATA caddies, and those I cannot find at all anywhere.
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.
When should people complain actually complain - See The Slow Boil: A History Lesson Repeated - https://www.borntotale.com/post/the-slow-boil-a-history-less... ...
Yes, see https://asahilinux.org
>Can you distribute software for Mac platform without Apple as an intermediary, outside the App Store?
Yes.
>Can you create new kernel extensions / system software for macOS without Apple as an intermediary?
Kernel extensions are effectively deprecated in favour of system extensions.
>The answer to all that is No
It's easy to be blinded by your biases.
Large margins, large round corners, now touchscreen.
"Yes, war with Iran has been threatened many times but we can rest assured it will never happen because nobody has done it before."
https://wadetregaskis.com/dns-resolution-failures-in-macos-2...
For backups use a NAS. You can find from completely plug and play options to bring your own machine ones.
Because it isn't LVM, and giving it the same name as another similar-but-distinct technology would just make matters more confusing.
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe one of these nifty things would be fun: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
The case I have is a Jonsbo N2, which works great for accommodating 5 3.5" drives with backplane, a mini-ITX mobo: https://www.amazon.ca/N2-Aluminum-Support-Integrated-Removab...
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.
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.
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 manages logical volumes. Any quibbling is a matter of degree.