APFS

[Trebuin]

Quick question: Will Asus or anyone else add support for APFS external drives?

The only reason why I'm considering this is because the ability for the FS to detect identical files & free up the space. Encryption would be nice as well.

 

[Dragon]

I don't believe the spec/code have yet been released, so not much chance of anyone seriously trying till then.

To quote official apple apfs page:

Is APFS open source?

An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format specification.

 

[o-l-a-v]

Its apple. You think they will open source it, or even allow it to be open sourced?

There are other file systems with similar features, like btrfs and zfs, thats is more likely to catch on with Linux routers.

 

[XIII]

Its apple. You think they will open source it, or even allow it to be open sourced?

Despite their reputation they do open source some stuff, like the programming language Swift and their Darwin kernel:

https://github.com/apple

 

[Trebuin]

One of my thoughts to tackle my problem is to create a sparse bundle that's APFS on the network drive, much like how time machine operates. There may be a risk of the entire bundle becoming corrupt unless it splits the file up. I don't have any experience with that, but will start looking at that as an option. If there's risk, I'm not doing it.

 

[RMerlin]

You'd have to ask Tuxera what their plans are for APFS. Since we're talking about a new proprietary filesystem, I wouldn't expect any third party implementation for years.

Just use something that's already widely supported for your USB disks.

 

[jrmwvu04]

APFS isn’t even completely finished/supported on MacOS (fusion drives). I would echo @RMerlin in thinking it will be a while, if ever.

 

[Segphault]

You'd have to ask Tuxera what their plans are for APFS. Since we're talking about a new proprietary filesystem, I wouldn't expect any third party implementation for years.

Just use something that's already widely supported for your USB disks.

@RMerlin is this a possibility now? I don't know anything about the relationship between the project and Tuxera, but you mentioned them in this post and they have a blog post claiming APFS compatibility now.

 

[ColinTaylor]

@RMerlin is this a possibility now? I don't know anything about the relationship between the project and Tuxera, but you mentioned them in this post and they have a blog post claiming APFS compatibility now.

I guess that's a question for Asus and whether they want to pay the licence fee to support a read-only filesystem.

Full write functionality for the APFS file system implementation is planned for a future release of Tuxera APFS