A few days later, and we're back with another beta. But not with a lot more sleep, so I'm afraid we're going to have another relatively dry and factual post. With barely a parenthetical. No asides. Hardly any wind-up. Just the facts and nothing but. Pitched right down the middle. Put out there for you. Right in front of your face. No need to scroll. Hardly a word out of place. Nothing wasted. Not a single ounce of fat. Lean, tight prose.
Get to the Point
We've done a bunch more internal work on this beta, so (in general - hah! got a parenthetical in there) it should be cleaner and more functional for all. Specific changes include:
Erase, then copy now works with APFS When you're copying APFS to APFS, you can now use Erase rather than Smart Update, if you want to (or need to, because you're unregistered—but please register).
Improved bootability We've improved some edge case handling for some boot configurations.
Fixed non-expanding main window & copy now button In some configurations, the main window wouldn't expand, the copy now button wouldn't work, some elements of UI wouldn't reflect the current pop-up settings, etc. The root cause for all these problems has been fixed.
Drive UUIDs no longer shown instead of the name in some fields That's right, you didn't name your drive 3443-93YDAE-8834F-007EEDA, we goofed.
Source pop-up shows the size again And all is right with the world.
Better logging Mostly to help me when I'm helping you, which helps you, and me. Win-win.
Inconceivable
We had a few reports from people who were getting a very weird error during the bless process: they'd get a file not found error, and the backup would abort. With the help of some willing users (apologies and thanks to Jeff, Mark, Glen, Bryan, Michael and Paul), we thought the common element was FireWire, but then someone checked in with the same case with USB.
So we ruled out FireWire and pursued a bunch of different things, none of which worked.
Until we determined that the USB guy was having a different problem. Which meant all the others were FireWire. So, we asked for those who could to take the same drive, switch to USB, and Smart Update the result and... it worked.
Unbelievably, High Sierra won't bless APFS on FireWire, at least in its default configuration. We're trying to see if we can come up with a way around that, but until then, connect your FireWire drives via USB or Thunderbolt.
End of an era, folks.
UPDATE: We're having success with FireWire in-house, so it's definitely not all FireWire configurations. We're still trying to figure this out.
Just the Tips
Some things to keep in mind:
If you've just turned on encryption, your backups can't be performed until the encryption process is complete, since snapshots are disabled during the encryption process. So, sit back and let the encryption magic happen...then back up.
Please install SuperDuper! when you're an admin. Otherwise, the Quarantine attribute can get stuck on. Note that it's often easier to install by running SuperDuper! from its download image: it'll offer to install itself.
Don't convert a backup volume from HFS+ to APFS. Instead, erase it using the steps in the previous blog post.
Stop Yer Yappin'
See? Short post. Going to sleep now. Download away:
