Alternate title: Apple’s file system engineers are sadly naive.
I was quite disappointed to see that APFS isn’t even trying to provide data integrity. Data integrity is kind of step 0 of any file system, and checksums or use of ECC is pretty much standard in modern & leading-edge file systems. APFS doesn’t want to be one of those, it seems.
Case in point why this matters:
I have a bunch of old backup drives, because drives are cheap and until recently I could just buy a new one once the current one filled, instead of ever deleting a backup. Periodically I go back through these old backup drives and do some basic integrity checks (S.M.A.R.T. bad block scans, file system checks, etc).
I also run a comparison of key data between those backups and the current versions on my computer, for files which generally shouldn’t change nor disappear – e.g. photos, videos, key documents, etc.
And today I found that at least half a dozen valuable personal videos (and a few photos) were corrupt, in the versions on my computer. Luckily, the versions in the ancient backups were still good, so I could replace the corrupt ones.
This corruption was completely silent, until my ‘paranoid’ and time-consuming checks discovered it.
It’s far from the first time. A failing drive years back corrupted a huge portion of my music library – silently, as far as the file system & OS were concerned. Periodically I’ve discovered photos (of which I have huge numbers – the majority of my data) which have become corrupt at some indeterminate point. And I’ve of course had file system [metadata] corruption occur many times, sometimes requiring complete erasure of the disk, and recovery or rebuilds from backup (a few times I’ve had to use data recovery software, where backups weren’t available).
Most, if not all, of these issues would have been discovered by even the most trivial file integrity protections, in the file system.
The notion that modern disks somehow magically protect against all silent data corruption is abject poppycock. They’re more likely to suffer from it than older disks – a byproduct of higher densities and market demand for cheaper, crappier storage products.
And the implicit assertion that Apple’s file system driver, and kernel overall, are somehow completely free of bugs… is just batshit crazy.
Addendum
Since Apple aren’t interested in protecting anyone’s valuable personal data, I’m on the look-out for other options. Manual use of shasum is one, for now, but a more streamlined and fool-proof system would be better. Alas, none seems to exist[1. There is chkbit, but it relies on MD5… probably acceptable for this use case, but needless in the face of decades of better hash algorithms. And it’s written in JavaScript. Ew.]. Yet.
