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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

It's not HFS. That in itself is a pretty huge advantage.

That's not really a useful statement. HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested. This will be a completely new filesystem, which means it will have lots of new code that can have bugs or incompatibilities with current apps. APFS sounds like it's going to be great, but I think not being HFS is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

It's tested, so there's less risk of new and unexpected bugs, but the known problems are significant: https://blog.barthe.ph/2014/06/10/hfs-plus-bit-rot/.

HFS+ didn't lose any files, his hard drive did. He wouldn't necessarily be able to get them back with filesystem-level checksum either, but he would know they're gone faster.

BTW, disk images already provide checksumming, and so does authenticated encryption.

> HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested

Nope. HFS+ is REALLY GOOD at losing data or having silent corruption. I'm thrilled to have a new filesystem just because it's not HFS based.

I'd celebrate having NTFS as the official filesystem. It's much more modern than HFS+.

Now you've got me wondering what would be required to convince the OSX kernel to boot from an NTFS-formatted volume. It certainly has the drivers (even if they're normally set to only mount NTFS volumes read-only.)

Come on. HFS+ has been a shame for 15 years now. It's been the laughing stock of the filesystem community for ages. They got the developer of BeFS on board to patch the thing until it may apes a modern filesystem for a couple of days at a time, and that's about it. It deserves to die an ugly death, strangled in a back alley without mercy. It's about as good as LINDOS/FAT32.

God, what a relief, we're almost done with this monstrosity of HFS+. Didn't you hear the collective sigh of anyone having to _work_ with this flea-market antique FS?

Technically under the covers HFS isn't anything great. But from a users point of view apple has extended it in ways that it hasn't materss to customers.

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