Still No APFS repair tools?

Most ‘experts’ suggest a second back up off the premises incase of fire. But I don’t either.

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In the old days, emphasizing the need for good, reliable backups, we used to say “there are those who have already lost all their data, and those who have not yet lost all their data”. Despite the fact that big-time catastrophes, hardware and software, seem to happen less frequently today (even back then they didn’t happen too often), that’s as valid as it ever was.

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Fortunately (and surprisingly), neither of these things are true! Alsoft is going to support APFS in a future Disk Warrior update:

  1. The next major release of DiskWarrior will include the ability to rebuild APFS disks.

  2. Click here to join the Mailing List to be notified of progress regarding Apple File System (APFS) support and updates to DiskWarrior.

DiskWarrior 5.3 & APFS — ALSOFT

I read somewhere (can’t remember where unfortunately) that Alsoft has said Apple does now provide sufficient APFS documentation. It has taken many, many years, which isn’t good, but at least we’re getting there.

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DiskWarrior was sometimes criticized as being only a one-trick pony. Maybe it was, but they did that trick, which was a very important trick, better than anyone else. So I hope you’re right. But though they’re apparently not dead, they’ve been in a coma so long that I can only say I’ll believe it when I see it.

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My issue is not backups but recovery integrity from an SSD running APFS. I’m recopying things to the new drive now (it’s an overnight affair) and prevents me from doing stuff in Logic (since some of my sample libraries live on this drive).

Alsoft has updated their HFS stuff and my copy of DiskWarrior was actually used on some drives, for fun! (well, to check the directories on the drives) I have floppies of Disk Express and Disk Express II around here (from way back when there were separate apple programs for Formatting and Utilities). in the 2000’s I did a lot disk repair/file salvage and recovery -while i do that a lot less (actually I just recovered a bunch of Zip disks for someone and that was NOT a pretty thing- half of the Zip drives work half the time and half of the Zip disks don’t work…) Anyhow even when I barely know a customer I hate to see data loss. And when my own disk goes belly up and Nothing sees it enough to “fix it” or “copy it” I get really annoyed about the lack of good tools.

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If the drive isn’t showing up on the USB bus at all, then no amount of disk repair utilities will help. If I understand your original message, you’re seeing a generic USB device, not a mass-storage device. Which tells me that the SSD controller chip has failed.

I saw something similar with an OWC SSD installed in a 2011 MacBook Air. When under heavy use, it would overheat and then fail. The Mac would freeze, and (after booting from an external drive), I would see (in the system profiler) a generic device where the SSD should be. After it cooled down, it would start working again. (We exchanged the drive for a new one, which exhibited the same problem. Then we gave up and put back the smaller Apple SSD, which never had a problem.)

You have to select your backup strategy based on what you think will be necessary. Off-site storage is important because the building could get damaged or destroyed (fire, hurricane, tornado or other reason). Even if you can get the drive later (e.g. if it is in a fireproof safe), you will probably want to buy a new computer and restore that backup to get up and running before you have a chance to sift through the debris looking for your drive.

That having been said, I’m not using an off-site backup either. I keep three backup devices. A Time Machine volume, and two (CCC-created) clones that I update manually every few weeks. The CCC-clones are kept powered off except when I’m explicitly accessing them.

Alsoft has been saying this for quite a long time. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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What may take even longer will be for Alsoft to establish a reputation for its ability to work with APFS, as it had with HFS.

Not only has APFS been undocumented, I believe I have heard rumors that it continued to evolve after it came into use. If/when Disk Warrior for APFS is released, the market will expect it to flawlessly read and replace directories of these earlier versions, as well as the then-current documented version.

To meet that high expectation will require very thorough testing. This level of quality control will add considerable time before an APFS version can be released.

Thus the exceedingly long time before release of an APFS-capable Disk Warrior is probably due to the high quality we all expect, compounded with other acknowledged factors.

From what I’ve heard—from SoftRAID author Tim Standing at MacTech 2019, I believe, the constant evolution is precisely why it hasn’t been documented. Apple doesn’t want developers to write something that will break when the underlying code is updated.

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Wow! We’ve all been beta-testing a file-system for ~9 years?

;~}

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2019 was a pandemic lifetime ago! If you build an operating system I would think you’d want a very stable File System to work with it. I suspect intel/silicon transition may have something to do with the way APFS rolled out. I used to set up 'nix boxes a lot and partitioning those things was a form of Black Magic (well, Partition Magic). I must say I was a little surprised to see the containers of APFS - when HFS+ was very easy to manage -but even TIME MACHINE is dodgy and that’s not good. I don’t mind if a file system is proprietary - but it should have given me a warning since data recovery from SSDs is much more dodgy than mechanical drives.

I have heard from several developers that the reason there are not any 3rd party recovery or repair tools for APFS is because Apple will not release the necessary information about APFS to allow them to develop them. My view on this it is just more evidence of Apples migration towards totally closed systems effecting placing a firewall around Apple users, using the excuse to protect them but in reality, it seems to be a paradigm to maximize their profits by isolating the from their competitors. The end result is that it is getting more and more difficult for Apple users to integrate and exchange information with other systems along making it significantly more expensive to use Apple products. Such is the result of Apples paradigm shift from the putting profits first instead of the customer/user experience which seems to have happened with the tragic loss of Steve Jobs. The only workaround I have found to resolve such issues is to erase and reinstall macOS and restore the User and App files from backups.

According to some developers’ comments, APFS also has a number hidden issues/bugs that can result in drive corruption that cannot be repaired with Disk Utility. My solution to this is keeping my user created data on a separate drive with HFS (no macOS on it), and using aliases on my primary drive to access it. Unfortunately, this cannot be done with a number of Apple Apps such as Notes, Mail, Contacts, Reminders, Messages and remote/cloud services as they reside in the user library and are often integrated with iCloud. I also believe that one of the reasons for this is to coerce users to purchase more iCloud space-i.e. profits. This is why I have migrated to using some other products for those items that can take up a lot of iCloud space such as Notes, and reminders. For these I use MS OneNote and ToDo. As it turns out ToDo is much more powerful than Reminders and also automatically syncs to it. It also supports Alexa which allows me to add tasks to my ToDo list using Alexa Auto in my car while driving and retrieving them later either in ToDo or Reminders.

Every so often I additionally make backups of my complete User Folder and Applications Folder to another drive. This can be challenging to do if you include user libraries as some of the folders, most related to cloud servers, are protected in such a way that doesn’t allow Finder to copy them. So, what I land up doing when making such backups is to separately copy the contents of my primary user library contents separatly to the backup drive minus the cloud folders in it. Since the contents are on a cloud server, they actually do not need to be backed up locally.

One of the issues I have found with Ventura is that Apple now prevents you from accessing the System partition from Disk Utility. This means it seems no longer possible with a corrupted System to boot to Recovery; erase the System partition; and reinstall MacOS into it preserving the data on the drive. My experience is you can reinstall macOS onto the drive again but it now goes into the data partition and you lose the former System partition space unless you backup, and erase the drive first. Thís might have been some glitch or failure on my part to do this correctly as I have never found any documentation on doing this and Apple Support is of no assistance in doing this as they claim it is beyond the level of support that they can offer.

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I am truly sorry for your data loss and know first hand how it feels. I’ve modified how I now feel about backups because of my own experience.

I’ve never had a main computer drive go bad on me. Never. I have, however, had 2 very expensive backup drives fail on me such as yours did. These were both Samsung 2TB SSD external USB drives. They both failed in the same way and no utility would revive them.

From this point onward, I will only backup individual files and folders that I know are not already backed up in iCloud or Google (I use both). And I do those backups inside an encrypted disk image on a thumb drive. I won’t go back to doing a clone of my internal drive. Ever.

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I can attest to that. I have had to reformat APFS backup drives way too often to have an level of comfort that it is reliable. And I’m not talking about old drives, in many cases they are deemed unrepairable after only a couple of months. I’m getting pretty fed up with the Microsofting of Apple. They used to be user friendly lol.

I didn’t have data loss - I have backups! I had some time loss. But no biggie. This issue was sudden with no notice. I’ve done LOTS of data recovery and I’ve noticed that many of the excellent softwares I’ve used in the past don’t have an APFS equivalent. As to booting IISI’s - Many computers like a good battery. (Funny how threads drift into other topics - I mentioned a IICI because it still boots HFS on a scsi drive.
Have a a great day!

Same here. I still don’t understand what’s so great about APFS. It’s confusing and unreliable.

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Just yesterday I had to re-install Ventura onto a MBA from the recovery partition. I was offered only the choice of ‘Macintosh HD’ (I think there was an instruction at Apple Support to select this if Data was also offered - yes, it’s here). So I checked to see if there was anything funny after reading this, and my internal SSD has according to Disk Utility, Container Disk3, which holds Macintosh HD, Data, VM and Preboot partitions just as in my MBP.

I would invite you to be very careful when doing this, based on my personal experiences, making sure that everything is backed up first and possibly some other way than Time Machine. The reason: on two occasions reinstalling MacOS without an existing system or root library has wiped out the drive without warning, effectively doing an erase and reinstall, resulting in total loss of everything that was on the drive. While Apple claims that this is not supposed to happen, it has happened to me twice.

Oh I was. TM plus CCC clone plus a disk of CCC snapshots, and I copied it all to an older Mac The last time I tried to do this the Mac would not progress beyond a certain point in the install. Eventually I wiped the disk, at which point it would not start at all. So I used Configurator to reinstall the base sytem on the recovery partition and while it would then boot into that partition, any attempt to install the full OS hung at the same point. Likely some bad blocks on the soldered in SSD.
I only did it to the MBA yesterday as it had become unusable with frequent kernel panics.

DW has saved me so many times.
In the last 2 years I lost (2) 2.5 inch SSD’s and 1 NvMe. One SSD was a primary drive but luckily I backed up only days before. The other ones were back ups.
So now I have a CCC schedule back-up scheme that fires up every day.
All 3 drives were still under warranty- but of course it wasn’t the money that was important. Well if it is true that Apple released the necessary documentation on APSF drives then hopefully Alsoft will get to it. After the loss of the primary drive I reformatted the primary drive back to HFS using Mojave as the OS. I also use TTPro but they upgrade to new versions almost every 12 or so months. Annoying. But it is still a valuable tool for laptop hardware.