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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

What new features do users gain from the new file system?

Optimized for SSDs, 64-bit inodes, faster timestamping (modification times etc), faster size calculations, faster cloning, safer copies, per-disk and file encryption, space saving sparse files, and more.

Certainly not transparent file system compression. Can save developers couple 10 GBs but hey (source code, binaries, debug symbols, all compress nicely).

being able to duplicate a 1GB directory in an instant

Is that a new feature? Isn't that just a performance improvement?

"What are these 'car' things? Do they really offer new features over horses? Isn't that just a performance improvement?"

It is most certainly a new feature.

APFS is copy-on-write, so when you duplicate a folder, it happens instantly regardless of how big it is because it doesn't have to make a copy until you start modifying the files. Moreover, because of COW, duplicate folders don't take up any extra hard-drive space. I literally just duplicated a 100 gigabyte folder to test, it completed instantly and I'm not using any more drive space than I was before. It will only start using drive space if i start modifying the files.

APFS is seriously cool (there are many other features besides this). It's not revolutionary (ZFS and Btrfs did all this before), but it's miles past HFS+. Apple has needed a new filesystem for more than a decade, and I'm glad it has finally happened, even if the OS update that brought it sucks pretty badly.

The main feature is that it is a modern filesystem that doesn’t carry around 25 years of baggage.

That doesn't mean anything other than "it's new which is somehow better."

It implies the design isn’t compromised by decisions that only made sense 25 years ago. For instance originally HFS didn’t even have journalling, it’s bolted on and not integrated.

It looks like the replacement has been compromised by other things however

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