So odds are good you’re already running APFS. Congrats, you probably didn’t even notice other than perhaps seeing that it did file operations like moving or duplicating even massive files was accomplished much more quickly. Upgraded to MacOS X 10.13 High Sierra or its more recent cousin Mojave? Your boot drive automatically switched formats from HFS+ to APFS! Running iOS 10.3 or higher – the latest as of this writing is iOS 12! – on your iPad or iPhone? You switched over to APFS too. Enter the newest solution: Apple File System, APFS. Jump up to 2TB or more and it becomes obvious that the size of files and the number of files on the drive is going to be much, much bigger too. At its most basic, the file system organizes the vast sprawl of data space into blocks and hooks them together so you can have big and small files, folders, and an entire file system hierarchy.ĭisks keep getting bigger, however, and a file system that worked for a 20MB drive back in the day was already a bit clumsy for a 2GB drive. You might never have given it a moment’s thought, actually, but there’s a long history of file system development. File systems are one of the technologies we don’t think much about on a daily basis, but make our computers, phones, tablets, even DVRs work smoothly and efficiently.
