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.