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User profile for user: Rumoldfashioned
Rumoldfashioned Author
User level: Level 1
12 points

Can't get disk to be "journaled"?

I read somewhere that it'd be beneficial to format my main disk as Mac OS Journaled to improve performance with large music sampler libraries.


So I went and checked in Disk Utility whether or not my disk was "journaled" already. It said "Journaled: No" and the option "File - Enable Journaling" was greyed out. So I assumed my disk was formatted somehow differently.


Then did a backup and erased and re-formatted my disk as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Re-installed Big Sur and loaded my backup. After that, went back to Disk Utility only to see that disk was still "Journaled: No" and the "File - Enable Journaling" option was still greyed out.


So what's going on here? Is my disk already "journaled" but I'm not realizing it? Why does it say "Journaled: No" though? Or is my disk for some reason not able to get "journaled"? Or could it be that my backup brought back the "non-journaled state" automatically?!


Thanks in advance for any help. I'm on a Mac Mini, late 2014, with 1 TB fusion drive.




Posted on Dec 9, 2020 11:43 PM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,062 points

Posted on Dec 10, 2020 5:52 PM

The new APFS file system does not need to use a Journal due to the way APFS works when writing data. The APFS writes data to the drive differently than HFS+ so if the drive loses power you are unlikely to corrupt the file system. With older file systems like HFS+ if a drive lost power while writing the data the file system would become corrupt. A "journal" is used to keep track of the pending operations so if a drive loses power a file system check can use the journal to help correct the file system issues.


Here is a wiki page about APFS and here is a quote from that page comparing APFS (no journal) and HFS+ (Journaled):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

Apple File System [APFS] is designed to avoid metadata corruption caused by system crashes. Instead of overwriting existing metadata records in place, it writes entirely new records, points to the new ones and then releases the old ones, an approach known as redirect-on-write. This avoids corrupted records containing partial old and partial new data caused by a crash that occurs during an update. It also avoids having to write the change twice, as happens with an HFS+ journaled file system, where changes are written first to the journal and then to the catalog file.[15]


Here is a wiki article about file system "journals":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,062 points

Dec 10, 2020 5:52 PM in response to Rumoldfashioned

The new APFS file system does not need to use a Journal due to the way APFS works when writing data. The APFS writes data to the drive differently than HFS+ so if the drive loses power you are unlikely to corrupt the file system. With older file systems like HFS+ if a drive lost power while writing the data the file system would become corrupt. A "journal" is used to keep track of the pending operations so if a drive loses power a file system check can use the journal to help correct the file system issues.


Here is a wiki page about APFS and here is a quote from that page comparing APFS (no journal) and HFS+ (Journaled):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

Apple File System [APFS] is designed to avoid metadata corruption caused by system crashes. Instead of overwriting existing metadata records in place, it writes entirely new records, points to the new ones and then releases the old ones, an approach known as redirect-on-write. This avoids corrupted records containing partial old and partial new data caused by a crash that occurs during an update. It also avoids having to write the change twice, as happens with an HFS+ journaled file system, where changes are written first to the journal and then to the catalog file.[15]


Here is a wiki article about file system "journals":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system

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Can't get disk to be "journaled"?

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