![\"Mascote](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/apfs-v2.webp\")
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Apple announced APFS<\/strong> (Apple File System) at WWDC 2016. In March 2017, iOS 10.3 converted the iPhone's flash storage without the user noticing. In September of the same year, High Sierra did the same on the Mac's SSD. HFS+, from 1998 (and HFS from 1985), was born in the floppy-disk era. APFS was built for NAND, clones, and encryption.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Apple's own document said it: HFS and HFS+ were designed when files were measured in kilobytes and disks were spinning platters. Today, the iPhone stores hundreds of GB in low-latency flash, the Mac clones VMs, and Time Machine snapshots the volume every hour. HFS+ journaling is not copy-on-write; directory hard links (Time Machine's old trick) do not exist in APFS; one-second timestamps do not work for an SSD writing millions of files.<\/p>\n Dominic Giampaolo, one of the architects, had already built the BeOS filesystem with HFS's shortcomings in mind. APFS is that reckoning \u2014 closed, on hardware Apple controls.<\/p>\n The piece that changes the mental model: an APFS container<\/strong> is the partition. Inside it fit multiple volumes<\/strong> that share free space<\/em>. It is not \u201cMacintosh HD = 500 GB and Data = 500 GB\u201d. It is a pool. The system volume and data volume grow and shrink in the same tank.<\/p>\n On a current Mac, the typical layout is:<\/p>\n On a Mac, to see the actual container:<\/p>\n Writing a file does not overwrite the old block: it writes elsewhere and updates the tree. This yields three things HFS+ did not provide for free:<\/p>\n Encryption is native (AES-XTS), per volume, with multiple keys \u2014 FileVault is no longer a \u201cbolted-on vault\u201d on top of HFS+.<\/p>\n Details that matter every day: nanosecond timestamps, real sparse files, case-insensitive volumes on Mac (the default), and case-sensitive volumes on iOS and APFS Time Machine.<\/p>\n The kernel still doesn't<\/strong> mount APFS out of the box. The community route is the module linux-apfs-rw<\/a> (Ubuntu package In 2026, HFS+ still exists for the macOS bootable installer<\/strong> . An old Time Machine disk in journaled HFS+ still mounts on a Mac. Apple has already warned: starting with macOS 28<\/strong>, an HFS+ volume that is encrypted<\/em> will no longer be supported \u2014 it can be converted to encrypted APFS in Disk Utility without decrypting first (except Time Machine backups in that format).<\/p>\n An external disk that needs to coexist with Windows is still a case for exFAT<\/strong>. Outside Apple's ecosystem, APFS remains the ugly duckling: experimental on Linux, paid Paragon software on Windows.<\/p>\n APFS did not ask the user's permission in 2017: the iPhone woke up converted. Nine years later, the invisible \u201cvital organ\u201d makes clones, snapshots, and FileVault seem magical \u2014 and still makes life difficult when the disk lands on Linux.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apple announced APFS (Apple File System) at WWDC 2016. In March 2017, iOS 10.3 converted the iPhone\u2019s flash storage without users noticing. In September of that year, High Sierra did the same on SSDs \u2026 Read more<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,74,2,52],"tags":[77,165,164,4,53],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apfs","category-apple","category-linux","category-mac","tag-apfs","tag-filesystem","tag-hfs","tag-linux","tag-mac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1364,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/1364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What HFS+ could no longer handle<\/h2>\n
Container, volume, shared space<\/h2>\n
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diskutil list\ndiskutil apfs list\n<\/code><\/pre>\nCopy-on-write, clones, and snapshots<\/h2>\n
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tmutil<\/code> covers Data.<\/li>\nWhat about Linux?<\/h2>\n
apfs-dkms<\/code>), read-only by default; writing is experimental and can corrupt the container. FileVault\/APFS encrypted volumes are something the module cannot open<\/em>. The step-by-step how-to \u2014 HFS+ with hfsprogs<\/code>, APFS with DKMS, password in apfs-fuse<\/code> \u2014 is in Mac partition on Ubuntu<\/a>.<\/p>\n# Ubuntu: identificar e montar leitura\nlsblk -f\nsudo apt install apfs-dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)\nsudo modprobe apfs\nsudo mkdir -p \/mnt\/mac\nsudo mount -t apfs -o ro \/dev\/sdXY \/mnt\/mac\n<\/code><\/pre>\nWhat remains of HFS+<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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