macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

What blew my mind recently was that I could store an APFS sparsebundle on a NAS drive, then mount it over NFS and use it as a plain old APFS volume. Despite the filesystem layering, it works pretty much like a local volume, albeit with a bit of performance degradation. Seems preferable to something like iSCSI for using APFS with network storage.

Perhaps this new format would work even better?

kccqzy · 2 months ago

Not sure why that would blow your mind, but Apple's old Time Capsule basically mounted a sparsebundle over the network too. And yes I would also guess this new format would work better.

archagon · 2 months ago

My experience with NFS file management has been less than stellar, so running a full, virtualized, and performant APFS volume on top of it feels like a bit of a magic trick.

moondev · 3 months ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzd...

I guess this is the Apple version of qcow2 and friends

layer8 · 2 months ago

“Asif” is a fun name for a disk image format. It’s as-if it was a real disk. ;)

whycome · 2 months ago

Andor is a funny name for a tv show

teaearlgraycold · 2 months ago

Well, TV show and/or long movie depending on how you look at it.

tayiorrobinson · 2 months ago

The benchmarks are weird to me - the ASIF tests were done on M3/4, but for everything else it was done on an M1?

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bradknowles · 2 months ago

Yeah, that jumped out at me, too.

If they can’t re-run the benchmarks on the same hardware, it’s hard to compare the numbers.

AnonC · 2 months ago

I skimmed through the article, but I have a question that I hope someone can answer. I have a sparse disk image created on a NAS (which runs Linux), and I use it to backup some stuff (not a VM) from the Mac in the native format (the macOS APFS file system).

Would this new format, ASIF, make this faster and better whenever I switch to macOS Tahoe? I hope there wouldn’t be any gotchas with respect to storing this disk image on a NAS.

poisonwomb · 2 months ago

Yeah I’m interested in this as well. There’s something about the way time machine works over SMB that is absolutely unfashionably dog-slow. I suspect SMB performance on mac is just not very good in general tbf

bigyabai · 3 months ago

bowsamic · 3 months ago

My favourite blog specifically for the painting articles

baggy_trough · 3 months ago

They are amazing, for sure.

chrisweekly · 3 months ago

Yes! So glad GP brought that up. Bookmarked, looking fwd to spending more time absorbing the fantastic images and accompanying texts.

littlecranky67 · 2 months ago

I wonder with the recent changes regarding containers and now disk images, if Apple plans to enter the server or cloud market.