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Comment by oschrenk | Hacker News Reader

What keeps me from updating that I am confused about the way forward regarding FileVault & APFS. I currently have FileVault enabled as I need my drive to be fully encrypted (liability for my clients). I want my backups to be encrypted as well.

But now APFS solves disk encryption on FS layer instead of going through CoreStorage. And I'm confused about the way forward for me.

Is there some documentation that explains 1) What happens to FileVault/Backups during initial conversion? 2) Am I better off to disable FileVault and then encrypt using APFS? 3) How does the APFS full disk encryption work? Does it have any problems, especially backup related? 4) Can I enable/disable FileVault after the conversion?

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From my personal experience with the developer betas on my laptop;

I experienced no issue during the conversion of Corestorage Filevault to APFS Filevault. The conversion to APFS was offered as an option to me during the Developer Beta series.

I am not sure whether this will be done automatically for the release version. However I do understand that the conversion will only be offered to systems with Flash Storage only, whereas Fusion Drive and Hard Disk equipped systems will not. (as per: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018 )

I found that the process required no interaction on my part and that my system came back up without issue. Likewise, there was no change with how Time Machine operated for me, in fact I don't believe that Time Machine backups are touched by the conversion process.

On another fusion drive equipped system I have, I was able to manually enable Filevault after filesystem conversion to APFS. You should be able to disable it after conversion too, though I've not yet tested this out.

That was a concern to me before I migrated two laptops: one had FileVault enabled and the other not†. The conversion dealt with FileVault without a hitch. Even better, enabling FileVault on the non-encrypted one after the conversion let it encrypt without even the reboot previously required with HFS+, one less excuse not to enable it.

Backups to an external disk are still done to HFS+. External disks formatted as APFS either do not show up as available disks to backup to or prompt to format the disk back to HFS+ (I encountered both cases as I was trying to put TM into submission on that one). Remote backups (over AFP) are unaffected and still use (optionally encrypted) sparse bundles. So Time Machine itself appears to have not changed much in that regard. Local snapshots do leverage APFS snapshots though and are browsable at /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots.

† A mistake on my part following a restore from Time Machine where I did not enable encryption.

And I'm even more confused about how things should go about for more complicated Core Storage setups. I have several disks with Core Storage. All of them have multiple logical volume families in a single logical volume group. And some are encrypted and others are not. I also have Core Storage volume groups that span multiple hard disks and/or hard disk partitions. I read the Ars review but that doesn't cover APFS in much technical detail at all. I'm really missing those Core Storage deep dives in Siracusa reviews.

Not exactly on point, but I found this to be an excellent read & comfort:

https://macdaddy.io/apfs-backup-software-developers-perspect...

Like the other commenters here, I can confirm that the FileVault -> APFS transition went smoothly.

Anyone know how the APFS conversion goes if you have hardware RAID setup?

I’m sporting a Mac Pro mid-2010 and have a RAID-5 array that’ll need to upgrade.

System Information 10.13 reports a medium type "SSD" for my stock MacPro6,1 flash and medium types "SSD" or "Rotational", as appropriate, for SATA SSDs and hard drives connected via non-RAID Thunderbolt AHCI controllers.

For my two Thunderbolt SAS RAID arrays, however, System Information shows no "Medium Type" field at all. And Disk Utility reports "Solid state: No" for both, even though one is, in fact, all SSD.

Therefore, on this one particular Areca controller at least, I'd be willing to bet that SSD boot volumes would look just like rotational hard drives to APFS and the installer, and therefore would not have been auto-converted at installation time.

With that said, on the GM candidate, converting the volumes on these RAID arrays to APFS after the fact was as simple as right-clicking each in Disk Utility and selecting "Convert to APFS...". And it the week or so since I did so, I've had no problems or regrets.

All volumes on this system are FileVault-encrypted, and APFS conversion did nothing to change this.

I’m guessing that’s a spinning rust array? If so it won’t be converted: APFS only gets applied to pure flash setups.

It’s an all Intel ssd array. Not supported by Apple in any way though. I guess it’ll be skipped.

Yeah, my sense is that only Apple SSDs and later on Fusion Drives will get converted to APFS.

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