Archiving & High Sierra (APFS format) - warning

Hi all,

This is not related to Logic, so if moderators feel appropriate to move this to some other forum subsection, or to delete it altogether, sorry about the inconvenience and my apologies.

It's been some talk here about High Sierra and the new APFS file system that is imposed with it (as well as impact this has on various things). For those interested, I recommend you read the last post (Feb 15) of Mike Bombich, the editor of Carbon Copy Cloner, who identified what he calls a "serious flaw in macOS High Sierra", and more specifically in sparse bundle disk images formated with the APFS format. Until a correction is provided by Apple, they drop support altogether:

https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/13/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

In a nutshell, using that format, in some circumstances what you think you have archived using that type of disk images is simply not archived, but instead lost. The issue doesn't affect APFS-formatted disks, but only APFS-formated disk images in sparse bundle form (i.e. archives). For those who wouldn't know, sparse bundle is the type of disk image used by archive tools such as Time Machine (or Carbon Copy Cloner if you set it up this way), especially when archiving over a network (e.g. to a Time Capsule, for instance, but that's also true for archiving to a NAS quite often). Admittedly, you don't *have* to format a sparse bundle using the APFS format, for what I know at least (you could still format it using HFS+, for instance), but I guess the above is important to be aware of. Much more educated explanations than what I can summarize here are provided in this post.

Cheers.