APFS

What an exciting week! Once again this year our team was graced with a WWDC "Golden Ticket". Last year I got to go, but this year Peter from our Development team went and had the opportunity to speak directly with Apple's File Systems team about the upcoming changes to APFS. Among the new announcements this year is the introduction of a read-only system volume on macOS Catalina.

On the eve of World Backup Day and with stories like the Atlanta ransomware attack still in the news, now is a great time to revisit your backup strategy. It's also a great time for us to announce some great new features that we're getting ready to deliver as a free update to CCC 5 users – features that will help you improve your defenses against ransomware and malware.

Update September 24, 2018: This issue is resolved on macOS Mojave.

Update March 30, 2018: This issue persists on macOS 10.13.4 (17E199)

This week we reported to Apple a serious flaw in macOS that can lead to data loss when using an APFS-formatted disk image. Until Apple issues a macOS update that resolves this problem, we're dropping support for APFS-formatted disk images.

Well, I did it. I know that I've told many people I'd be waiting until Thanksgiving to apply the High Sierra upgrade to my own production machine, but after some reflection this week, I decided that High Sierra was ready for me, and that I was ready for High Sierra. I've always been decidedly anti-upgrade when it comes to my own production system. Upgrades tend to break things, and I just can't afford downtime on my laptop. High Sierra and the APFS transition, to me, was a potential double-whammy for breaking things, so I was bearish on this upgrade in particular.

One of our users made a startling discovery this week after upgrading to High Sierra. He had an HFS+ formatted 16TB RAID device, and had always intended to enable encryption on that volume. There's no OS on it, so he simply right-clicked on the volume in the Finder and chose the option to encrypt it:

This is an easy way to enable encryption on a volume: plug in a password, verify, add a hint, done!

The time for betas is over! High Sierra is here. APFS is here. We're ready for both, and we've got you covered. APFS, HFS, encrypted, not encrypted, FileVault – whatever your source or destination, we support all of these combinations in CCC 5. We've tested so many different scenarios, we put the results into a chart to keep track of them.

On Tuesday Apple announced the release date for macOS High Sierra – we can expect to see it on the App Store on September 25. We've been busy testing High Sierra over the summer, and I'm happy to say that we're ready for it. We've posted an update to CCC 4 that fixes a couple cosmetic High-Sierra-specific issues, and we're preparing to release an update to CCC 5 with the same fixes, plus more improvements that are specific to High Sierra.

We're delighted to announce the next major version of CCC. With powerful new features for the advanced user and helpful features and simplifications for the novice user – CCC 5 makes managing your backups easier for everyone. Take a look at what's new in CCC 5: