Resolved Is it possible to install Mojave and keep HFS+ ?

[DimaVR]

2 reasons.
1. APFS is an unstable piece of crap.
2. It doesnt play nice with other operating systems, other drives, or even its OWN flipping drive. Windows and Linux installs can become non-bootable just because an APFS drive is present on the system, those OS’s become invisible to your OS X install, and you cant even wipe an APFS drive with Apple’s own disk utility. (All this, last time i tried)

Its just a step, along with T2, to make Apple’s computers impossible to integrate into any non-apple environment, which is of coarse Apple’s only goal.

Well we have a Mac for a reason! I can’t see a person buying a Mac to install different OS! Stop hating both my my drives are APFS and has been since 2017 with no issues! And I been installing beta on top of beta OS starting with Sierra with no issues and it updates over and over again and never crashed on me ones!!! And I have 1.5 TB of data on the computer and it keeps on going!!!

mid you going to install Linux or other OS I’m sure people will buy cheaper windows computer people that do want Linux like me run VM machine anyway and works fine.
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I just tried with an internal SSD on a non-t2 macbook air. Works perfect. Thanks.

I think it’s perfectly fine AFPS

 

[mj_]

Well we have a Mac for a reason!

Tell me, what reason could that be? I'm sure you have a Mac for a reason. Other people have Macs for other reasons. So stop generalizing and assuming that your opinion and your experience is the only one that counts because, spoiler alert, it's not.

That said Apple has made it so annoyingly hard to avoid APFS that the only reasonable way is to steer clear of 10.14 and later altogether. Maybe one day, somewhere around 10.17 or 10.18, Apple will have ironed out most of the bugs in APFS and it might be fit to hold a candle to well-stablished filesystems such as HFS+, NTFS or XFS. Until then I'll let others do the beta testing.

Once bitten, twice shy.

 

[JDLang76]

Well we have a Mac for a reason! I can’t see a person buying a Mac to install different OS! Stop hating both my my drives are APFS and has been since 2017 with no issues! And I been installing beta on top of beta OS starting with Sierra with no issues and it updates over and over again and never crashed on me ones!!! And I have 1.5 TB of data on the computer and it keeps on going!!!

mid you going to install Linux or other OS I’m sure people will buy cheaper windows computer people that do want Linux like me run VM machine anyway and works fine.
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I think it’s perfectly fine AFPS

My reason - I use Mac Pros in my computer shop for drive testing and data recovery, due to their 6 drive bays and seamless ability to multi-boot Windows, OS X, and Linux. APFS literally ruins all of that.
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Tell me, what reason could that be? I'm sure you have a Mac for a reason. Other people have Macs for other reasons. So stop generalizing and assuming that your opinion and your experience is the only one that counts because, spoiler alert, it's not.

That said Apple has made it so annoyingly hard to avoid APFS that the only reasonable way is to steer clear of 10.14 and later altogether. Maybe one day, somewhere around 10.17 or 10.18, Apple will have ironed out most of the bugs in APFS and it might be fit to hold a candle to well-stablished filesystems such as HFS+, NTFS or XFS. Until then I'll let others do the beta testing.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Thank you.

 

[DimaVR]

All I’m saying is APFS works great for Mac OS is that’s what u are using I’m using latest beta and have no issues

 

[JDLang76]

All I’m saying is APFS works great for Mac OS is that’s what u are using I’m using latest beta and have no issues

Im glad APFS is satisfying you. Its fine for daily use, but for professionals, it doesnt hold a candle to HFS.

 

[chucker23n1]

2 reasons.
1. APFS is an unstable piece of crap.

…no it isn't.

There's zero evidence of any stability issues. There was one issue where sparse images weren't handled correctly, and that's unfortunate, but it's not a stability issue.

2. It doesnt play nice with other operating systems,

That I can see. If you need to access the FS from other OSes, HFS+ is a much better choice.

 

[mj_]

All I’m saying is APFS works great for Mac OS is that’s what u are using I’m using latest beta and have no issues

No. What you're saying is that APFS works great for Mac OS [sic] FOR YOU.

What you don't seem to be capable of is acknowledging the fact that you are not the center of the universe and the reference for all man- and womankind, and that maybe, just maybe, other people have other reqiurements, demands, and expectations than you do.

@chucker23n1 Unfortunately, @JDLang76 has a point. There are plenty of cases where APFS volumes corrupted for no obvious reason. Apple's own tools proved inadequate to fix them and third-party tools were not yet available due Apple's failure to document APFS for two full years after it was first introduced! They have since published the full documentation for APFS but for many small third-party software developers it was too little too late.

 

[chucker23n1]

@chucker23n1 Unfortunately, @JDLang76 has a point. There are plenty of cases where APFS volumes corrupted for no obvious reason.

It would seem plausible to me that a new file system has reliability problems in its early releases. But I've seen zero stories to that effect. If there are "plenty of cases", can you name one? Why isn't MacRumors reporting on them?

Apple's own tools proved inadequate to fix them and third-party tools were not yet available due Apple's failure to document APFS for two full years after it was first introduced! They have since published the full documentation for APFS but for many small third-party software developers it was too little too late.

The documentation criticism is valid, and as best as I can tell, the documentation, while comprehensive, is still read-only.

But I wasn't commenting on the documentation. There are certainly problems with APFS (including, say, that the Disk Utility GUI in High Sierra was quite buggy; the diskutil CLI worked much better), but to the best of my knowledge, reliability is not one of them. That may make APFS a poor choice for nerds who want it to interact with other operating systems, or dual-, triple-, quadruple-boot them on their computer, and it may be annoying or near-impossible to work with for tool vendors. But it makes APFS a perfectly fine choice for hundreds of millions of people out there, who can use APFS the way a file system should be used: they don't notice it at all. It just does its job.

 

[mj_]

It would seem plausible to me that a new file system has reliability problems in its early releases. But I've seen zero stories to that effect. If there are "plenty of cases", can you name one? Why isn't MacRumors reporting on them?

When you think about filesystem bugs don't think about bugs that are immediately obvious, clear cut, and easily reproducible. Think about random errors, race conditions, slow data corruption, etc. That's why nobody is reporting on them - there is nothing to report because there is no general issue. Thus, in this regard I agree with you that for most users APFS is most likely going to be absolutely fine, and they won't notice it at all. However, that doesn't mean that it's 100% bug free. There've been numerous threads about filesystem oddities when 10.13 was first released, just search the forums if you want to know more. I have personally seen two cases at work, one where files were corrupted during a copy-on-write transaction and one where entire directories suddenly went missing and files stored therein started reappearing in the root directory of the APFS volume as well as in random directories completely unrelated to the one that went missing. Again, neither of these cases was reproducible and immediately obvious yet both were filesystem-related oddities that I have never experienced or heard of before.

I get it that Apple is in dire need of a modern robust filesystem, and APFS is the way to go. What most users including me take offense at is the fact that Apple is forcing us to use APFS against our will, and that they are blatantly refusing to provide HFS+-installed 10.14 systems with updates for no reason other than "because we want to, and because we can, so f*** you!".

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

I didn't have problems with APFS on my MacBook Pro 2015.
However, I can confirm that I had many issues with APFS in Mojave with My MacPro 5,1. I had to reformat my SSD three times in 3 months. Besides disk damage, I also had trouble that when I emptied the trash, not all the space became free. (I talk about nearly 100 GB!) And when I click the mouse while running disk utility the computer locks up. Checking your APFS disks takes much more time and the startup time of the Mac is significant longer with APFS.
I had unrepairable disk damage after kernel panics (when the Mac waked up from sleep). I use a PCI-card OWC Accelsior SATA III with a Samsung EVO 850.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...after-3rd-kernel-panic.2191405/#post-27633956
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...s-hangs-under-osx-14-5.2185601/#post-27467050
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-apfs-problems-under-mojave.2183317/#post-27449337
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-unrepairable-in-mojave.2179261/#post-27318669
Before, I ran High Sierra under HFS+ and my computer was rock stable.
But the last supplemental update 10.14.6 seems to solve the problems of kernel panics and disk damage.
Anyway, I had to wait a long time.

 

[oatman13]

If you guys think running a filesystem that is not supported by Apple is going to work better than a filesystem that is supported, you guys are mistaken.

Running HFS+ is probably not being tested by Apple as the OS you are booting too.

In addition, imagine being an engineer at Apple and being told that you only need to support APFS. In that case, system software may start eliciting bugs if you are running HFS+ that would not occur with APFS. Running HFS+ on Mojave is risky, and should not be done unless you are comfortable diagnosing and triaging any issues you encounter along the way.

APFS is also a hard requirement for Catalina due to the dedicated system volume. We as a community should be embracing APFS and filing bugs using Feedback Assistant for any issues encountered along the way.

 

[pippox0]

I run Mojave on HFS+ very well ! Easy install -> install on APFs disk then clone on HFS+ with Carbon copy cloner or Superduper ...
That’s all.
Benefit: i can use any old stuffs which are incompatibile with APFs.

 

[toke lahti]

I bought a new mac mini with small (soldered) ssd, with the idea that the OS runs from internal and homedirs are in external ssd and parts of them in external hdd.
Few months later, I discover that you can't repair permission errors for your homedir in Mojave, if it's not on startup drive.
Then I found out, that you can't restore a system from TM backup to an external APFS drive.
Latest discovery is, that you can't clone APFS startup drive to another (external) drive, so the latter one would remain bootable.
Maybe there are nice explanations for these restrictions and maybe we do need SIP + T2 + APFS blessing, all secret stuff, but somehow it works out, that you need to buy always bigger soldered ssd's in (desktop) macs with a very tasty Apple tax.

What I still haven't found out is, that do I have to switch off all scurity settings in recovery to even show the boot options at boot time?
Because now, when I boot, I get just blank screen with option key down pressed...

 

[Panthera Tigris Altaica]

I bought a new mac mini with small (soldered) ssd, with the idea that the OS runs from internal and homedirs are in external ssd and parts of them in external hdd.
Few months later, I discover that you can't repair permission errors for your homedir in Mojave, if it's not on startup drive.
Then I found out, that you can't restore a system from TM backup to an external APFS drive.
Latest discovery is, that you can't clone APFS startup drive to another (external) drive, so the latter one would remain bootable.
Maybe there are nice explanations for these restrictions and maybe we do need SIP + T2 + APFS blessing, all secret stuff, but somehow it works out, that you need to buy always bigger soldered ssd's in (desktop) macs with a very tasty Apple tax.

What I still haven't found out is, that do I have to switch off all scurity settings in recovery to even show the boot options at boot time?
Because now, when I boot, I get just blank screen with option key down pressed...

Errm... I have cloned a bootable APFS SSD to an external spinning drive and to an internal spinning drive, both formatted APFS, and they're bootable. I used Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[mj_]

Yes, you can do it with CCC, which performs a filesystem-level copy of the drive and creates new preboot volumes required for bootable APFS drives. However, you cannot clone it with Apple's own disk utility because it fails to properly reinitialize the preboot volumes and thus fails to produce exact clones or even restorable images of APFS-formatted drives. In other words: you are forced to use third-party applications to achieve something as simple and trivial as cloning a drive because Apple has not yet managed to adapt its own tools to a filesystem they are forcing down everybody's throats regardless of the consequences.

I've just had to learn that the hard way, too.

 

[avz]

I am happy with APFS on my MacBook5,1. APFS local snapshots are pretty cool.

 

[toke lahti]

I've just had to learn that the hard way, too.

My situation is a bit different; most people make external clone as a backup.
If the main has problems, the external clone gets cloned back to internal.

My case is, that my system won't fit to internal, so my main drive is external.
And I have relied to TM backup, after I Fusioned my own cMP somewhere 7 yeas ago. Before that, I had raid1 system drive and made clones from it every now and then.

I'd like to keep using TM,
eg. with Mail it is very good for finding certain mails.
Manually finding them from those endless gibberish sub-directories is pretty hard.

If using TM needs the external startup drive to be hfs+, that's the way for me.
But there aren't so much info about this around...

Here's my thread about TM:
#5

 

[Riwam]

oatman wrote:
"You can't keep HFS; and if you somehow manage to do (using CarbonCopy Cloner or by mounting the drive and copying stuff over) you will never be offered Software Updates or an avenue to upgrade your Mac."

No.
You CAN "keep HFS" if you wish.
I have an external SSD (connected via USB3) that has the latest version of Mojave on it running under HFS+.

It's a little more work than usual to maintain, but it IS possible and "do-able".

Here's how I do it:
1. I have a "mule drive" -- a second hard drive (old, platter-based) that has a copy of Mojave running in APFS. It's my ONLY APFS drive, and it is never used, except when an update becomes available.
2. When an update is needed, I boot from my mule drive, and run software update.
3. Software update "finds" the updates and then applies them to the mule drive.
4. When done, I connect my "working drive" (USB3 SSD).
5. I then run CarbonCopyCloner on it, cloning the entire drive WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the "users" folder.
6. When done, I power down, put the mule drive away, and then I can boot and run with my completely-updated copy of Mojave running under HFS+.

YES -- it is "a few extra steps".
BUT -- it WORKS.

That's how I do it.
Others may have a better way.

But again -- it CAN be done, if you want to take the extra steps to do it.

A disclaimer:
I don't know if this method can be used on a Mac's internal drive, particularly new MacBook Pro's with the t2 chip. I just don't know, because I don't have one and can't try it.
But it DOES work when you're willing to boot from an external drive as described above.

******************************************************************************************************
Hello Fishrrman
Now that Mojave seems to have reached its final issue, did you "MULE" system worked as you suggested (as above) when Mojave was young and do you have now a HFS+ 10.14.6 running system?
Thank you very much in advance for your kind answer.
Regards
Ed

 

[Fishrrman]

"Now that Mojave seems to have reached its final issue, did you "MULE" system worked as you suggested (as above) when Mojave was young and do you have now a HFS+ 10.14.6 running system?"

I ran into a problem when I tried to get to "startup security" (after booting to recovery partition).
So... I compromised and put my boot partition back to APFS.
All my other partitions are HFS+.

I -might- go back to an HFS+ boot partition when Mojave "matures" (i.e., no more incremental updates).
For the time being, APFS is working well enough (though I'd rather it be HFS+).

My "cloned backup" of the boot partition does exist on an HFS+ volume.
It still boots and runs ok.

 

[Riwam]

"Now that Mojave seems to have reached its final issue, did you "MULE" system worked as you suggested (as above) when Mojave was young and do you have now a HFS+ 10.14.6 running system?"

I ran into a problem when I tried to get to "startup security" (after booting to recovery partition).
So... I compromised and put my boot partition back to APFS.
All my other partitions are HFS+.

I -might- go back to an HFS+ boot partition when Mojave "matures" (i.e., no more incremental updates).
For the time being, APFS is working well enough (though I'd rather it be HFS+).

My "cloned backup" of the boot partition does exist on an HFS+ volume.
It still boots and runs ok.

Thank you very much for your answer but I am afraid I do not see it clearly,
Would you kindly explain why you booted to recovery partition instead of installing what I assume was a security update (“startup security”???) instead of installing it in your APFS “Mule”?
I thought that the “Mule” should, according to your strategy explained a year ago, receive all updates and then you would clone the updated Mojave (without the Home part) to your main drive kept in HFS+.
And what you call “mature” as I see it would mean that Apple stops updating it, or do I see it wrong?
Please be so kind to elaborate on what you did.
I am still in HighSierra and intended to try to install Mojave 14.6 (assuming it is the last update) in an external clone of my HighSierra inner drive, thus upgrading it.
Then clone it back to the HFS+ inner drive.
Is that not possible in your opinion?
Thank you very much for your kind help!!!
Ed

 

[avz]

Thank you very much for your answer but I am afraid I do not see it clearly,
Would you kindly explain why you booted to recovery partition instead of installing what I assume was a security update (“startup security”???) instead of installing it in your APFS “Mule”?
I thought that the “Mule” should, according to your strategy explained a year ago, receive all updates and then you would clone the updated Mojave (without the Home part) to your main drive kept in HFS+.
And what you call “mature” as I see it would mean that Apple stops updating it, or do I see it wrong?
Please be so kind to elaborate on what you did.
I am still in HighSierra and intended to try to install Mojave 14.6 (assuming it is the last update) in an external clone of my HighSierra inner drive, thus upgrading it.
Then clone it back to the HFS+ inner drive.
Is that not possible in your opinion?
Thank you very much for your kind help!!!
Ed

I believe Fishrrman said that some features that he wanted to access are not functional on a HFS+ Mojave installation.

 

[Riwam]

I believe Fishrrman said that some features that he wanted to access are not functional on a HFS+ Mojave installation.

Thank you very much for your answer.
However I would like to have more information on what did not work.
Hope to hear more details before jumping to Mojave.
Thanks!
Ed

 

[avz]

Thank you very much for your answer.
However I would like to have more information on what did not work.
Hope to hear more details before jumping to Mojave.
Thanks!
Ed

 

[Riwam]

View attachment 856924

Thank you very much for showing me that Utility!

 

[Jerry Fritschle]

I run Mojave on HFS+ very well ! Easy install -> install on APFs disk then clone on HFS+ with Carbon copy cloner or Superduper ...
That’s all.
Benefit: i can use any old stuffs which are incompatibile with APFs.

Just so you know, this will not work on Catalina. The new Volume Group concept, which splits the boot drive container into separate System and Data volumes (with the System volume being read-only) absolutely, positively will not work on HFS+. The CCC developer has made this clear in his blog. You can still use HFS+ on drives that hold data, and TM still requires HFS+ until we hear differently.