I installed High Sierra today on my MacBook Pro which has its SSD split into two volumes, Boot and Data.
Boot was of course made into APFS when I installed HS, but I am now wondering if I ought to convert Data to APFS as well?
The notebook is shared on my home network and sometimes accessed from my old El Capitan-run Mac Pro 3,1.
Thanks in advance
Philip
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), macOS High Sierra (10.13.5)
If you have other Macs that are not running High Sierra and need access to your MacBook Pro's Data volume, you should keep your Data volume as HFS+. Otherwise, as an APFS volume those older OS's will not see it.
APFS is not recommended or intended for external, rotational hard drives. It's only intended for internal HDs with system installed. Users who have forced converted to APFS have reporeted losing data, particularly Time Machine drives.
Just leave well enough alone.
Try copying files to your El Capitan Mac from your High Sierra MacBook Pro (APFS system volume). If you can, then try writing to it. If you can, then I guess you'll be ok.
Until Apple completely sorts out APFS, I would not convert anything it doesn't do on its own.
If the data volume is on the same drive as the boot volume there should be no problem. Why did you add the second volume to the drive. It would work just as well as one volume with no problem of either volume running out of space while there's space on the other volume to be had.
As Old Toad says partitioning in such a manner actually prevents the system from using the disk space as needed and forces you to maintain it yourself. I recommend you reconsider and reformat as a single partition.
My thinking was only that if the boot/OS volume is APFS then it would be preferable that also the home folder volume uses the same for system.
Thanks very much for the reply, I really appreciate it.
When I connect from my El Capitan Mac to the MacBook Pro I am able to connect to the APFS Boot volume and see it in El Capitan's Finder.
I thought APFS volumes would be invisible, but perhaps they're visible and read-only? In that case I guess I could convert since I'll be able to copy necessary files - or am I wrong?
I am wondering about my specific case, a notebook with one SSD split into two volumes. If it is required, and presumably safe, to have the boot volume as APFS, they why would it not be safe to convert the data volume to APFS?
As for what I would hope to gain, I was merely wondering of the system wouldn't run better somehow if the volume with the user folder is using the same file system as the boot volume. Evidently I'm no expert but only asking questions because I'm interested.
Philip
The data loss on Time Machine drives stems from the fact that Time Machine requires hard links to directories. APFS omits this functionality rendering it incompatible with Time Machine which is why people are losing data, not because APFS is unstable. So Time Machine drives should be kept in the older HFS+ file system.
I forgot to add that the Data volume holds my user folder. Does that affect things?
Thanks in advance
Philip
What would you hope to gain by doing that?
Thank you I will try that.
So it's there a risk having the boot volume as APFS?
Has there been data loss also on systems which do not use Time Machine? I don't use that but since the Data volume holds my user folder I don't want to risk things if APFS is unstable.
Should I convert my Data volume to APFS?
