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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption

These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.

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FYI - HFS is capability of case sensitivity and is an option during formatting. I believe it even used to be the default.

HFS and HFS+ were never case-sensitive by default on Mac OS. Case-sensitive HFS+ was made available as an option in Mac OS 10.0, but was always glitchy (especially for boot volumes), because many applications depended on case insensitivity.

I think possibly the point of confusion is that very early versions of MacOS X (the original MacOS X server, and some of the MacOS X DPs, anyway) used UFS by default, not HFS+. UFS is case sensitive.

I have a case sensitive HFS+ and everything works fine.

That was a problem with older versions of Adobe suite, but since lots of people on Macs used Adobe Apps...

Isn't the problem still present? A few months back I tried installing the latest version of Photoshop and Illustrator, and it didn't let me.

> was always glitchy (especially for boot volumes), because many applications depended on case insensitivity.

So CS HFS+ is not glitchy, and CS APFS will not magically fix applications with CI dependency.

A quick note to any readers... I'd suggest avoiding a case-sensitive HFS+ boot volume with macOS. I used one for over a year, and it just brings trouble.

The biggest problems I encountered were (1) occasional bugs with Homebrew formulas, and (2) Adobe's applications cannot be installed on a case-sensitive file system.

What about snapshots? Does APFS offer efficient user-created snapshots? I run Ubuntu with btrfs, and for me this is a killer feature.

> Does APFS offer efficient user-created snapshots?

Yes: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/02/testing-out-snapshots-...

I'm hoping it will make Time Machine a lot better.

Isn't there a flag to make hfs case sensitive? Programs react poorly because it's rare, but it's available.

FWIW, HFS+ fully supported NFSv4 ACLs since... no idea, but they were already there in 2008.

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