APFS or HFS+ for external G-Drive?

[stiligFox]

I just got a new G-Drive USB C 4TB external drive, and copied 2TB of data off of a failing spinning drive to it. I'd formatted the drive out of the box, and disk utility had told me it was going to be HFS+ Extended, but now looking at it, I realize my 4TB drive is now APFS. Now that I've finished spending all day copying the data off, I'm wondering; is it still considered better to leave external spinning drives as HFS+? Should I format it again, and copy the data back to it again? I think my failing drive could handle one more full copy - it's starting to make ticking noises over the last few days but I think it'll hold up if I were to do this.

Thanks!

 

[coolfactor]

AFFS is a modern, stable, fast file system. You should not be concerned about this format unless you want to attach the drive to non-Mac systems or older Macs.

 

[rpmurray]

APFS is a file system that is not completely documented and because of that has no third-party support for recovery tools. It is also optimized for SSDs and is considerably slower than HFS+ on spinners.

Despite that, I would NOT tempt fate by erasing the external, formatting it as HFS+ and then doing the backup again. Especially if the drive you are backing up from is on its last gasp.

 

[Fishrrman]

If the drive is platter-based
and
If the drive is to be used for data (file) storage ONLY
then
Format it for HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled).

Things will go better that way.

My opinion only.
Others will disagree.
Some will disagree vehemently.

 

[mikzn]

I'd formatted the drive out of the box, and disk utility had told me it was going to be HFS+ Extended, but now looking at it, I realize my 4TB drive is now APFS.

I am guessing that your system is working on Big Sur because this is posted in the Big Sur forum?

Based on that I can't really see any good reason not to use APFS - especially since it works with every macOS since High Sierra

FWIW - I have 8 - 10 drives working wih APFS / HD spinners and SSD's - all have worked flawlessly and are probably faster because of the APFS

 

[stiligFox]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! I do use older Macs so I ended up reformatting it as HFS+ and attempted to copy all the data again.

That said it’s been nothing less than a massive headache. Got almost all 2TB of the data off except for my old archived Aperture library that’s about 33GB - if I try to copy it, it lags out and the transfer will free. I have it isolated to the Databases section of the library - something about it just refuses to copy to the G-Drive.

I assumed it was because my old drive was failing, so I pulled another copy of the library from a back up. Still can’t copy it to the the G-Drive. And now the G-Drive just sits here grinding nonstop like it’s reading a ton of data, but macOS shows 0kb/s read or write. The transfer bar will just sit there, and my drive's activity light is flashing nonstop, but no data is being written or read. It's infuriating! I can copy the data to and fro other drives just fine. It'll sit there for about 30 seconds, and then the drive will effectively crash and reload, and then it's unusable until I unplug the drive and plug it in (which is quite hard on the drive, I know!)

Pulling my hair out as this drive seems to causing more issues that it’s fixing…

 

[mikzn]

That said it’s been nothing less than a massive headache. Got almost all the data off except for my old archived Aperture library - if I try to copy it, it lags out and the transfer will free. I have it isolated to the Databases section of the library - something about it just refuses to copy to the G-Drive.

Ref Aperture library - I don't know if this will help or work any better - I use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) to back up my iPhoto (old) and Photos libraries (folder to folder back up) and also my Music Library (Media Files Folder) - perhaps might work faster?

Not sure if it will make any difference - but once it is done it is much faster because of the incremental back ups and the new APFS features + CCC

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"That said it’s been nothing less than a massive headache. Got almost all 2TB of the data off except for my old archived Aperture library that’s about 33GB - if I try to copy it, it lags out and the transfer will free. I have it isolated to the Databases section of the library - something about it just refuses to copy to the G-Drive."

I have a possible solution to your problem, that may work for you when finder copies fail.

That is:
Download CarbonCopyCloner (if you don't have it already).
Then, use CCC to copy/clone the data to the other drive.
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days, doing it "my way" will cost you no money.

WHY this will work:
If you try to copy a large number of files using the finder, and if the finder discovers a "bad file" (or more than one), it will abort the copy and the entire process may fail.

HOWEVER, if you use CCC, and if CCC encounters one or more bad or corrupted files, CCC WILL NOT STOP. Instead, it will "skip over" the bad files and try to keep copying all the good ones until the clone is done.

Then, CCC will present you with a list of the "bad files" and you can decide what to do with them (probably have to trash them if they're corrupted and un-copy-able).

Give CCC a try.
I think you may be very pleased with the results.

 

[stiligFox]

Thank you so much everyone! Sounds like I should definitely give CCC a go, I’ll give that a try tonight after I’m done streaming. Thanks so much!

OP wrote:
"That said it’s been nothing less than a massive headache. Got almost all 2TB of the data off except for my old archived Aperture library that’s about 33GB - if I try to copy it, it lags out and the transfer will free. I have it isolated to the Databases section of the library - something about it just refuses to copy to the G-Drive."

I have a possible solution to your problem, that may work for you when finder copies fail.

That is:
Download CarbonCopyCloner (if you don't have it already).
Then, use CCC to copy/clone the data to the other drive.
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days, doing it "my way" will cost you no money.

WHY this will work:
If you try to copy a large number of files using the finder, and if the finder discovers a "bad file" (or more than one), it will abort the copy and the entire process may fail.

HOWEVER, if you use CCC, and if CCC encounters one or more bad or corrupted files, CCC WILL NOT STOP. Instead, it will "skip over" the bad files and try to keep copying all the good ones until the clone is done.

Then, CCC will present you with a list of the "bad files" and you can decide what to do with them (probably have to trash them if they're corrupted and un-copy-able).

Give CCC a try.
I think you may be very pleased with the results.

 

[stiligFox]

Just as an update, I'm starting to think my original drive has been going bad for a while now... I knew better than to rely on a Seagate drive! It's a 2TB laptop drive that I've been using for some five years now, and now that I'm trying to get the data off of it, I'm noticing disk images are corrupted and won't mount, movies I made are garbled and won't play right...

I have a backup of almost all of the data on a 14TB drive that was made six months ago, but I'm finding that the files on the back up are all corrupted just the same exact way :c

 

[f_stephen_arvay]

I just got a new G-Drive USB C 4TB external drive, and copied 2TB of data off of a failing spinning drive to it. I'd formatted the drive out of the box, and disk utility had told me it was going to be HFS+ Extended, but now looking at it, I realize my 4TB drive is now APFS. Now that I've finished spending all day copying the data off, I'm wondering; is it still considered better to leave external spinning drives as HFS+? Should I format it again, and copy the data back to it again? I think my failing drive could handle one more full copy - it's starting to make ticking noises over the last few days but I think it'll hold up if I were to do this.

Thanks!

Have several of these G drives, 4 TB and 6 TB with the older connection and power supply type and the new Sandisk-pro version. I've read these debates and have tried both formats, APFS is the winner! There are many updates since that file format was released and I believe it works just fine with spinning platters. (Electro-Mechanical Hard Drives) there are other advantages as well such as the sharing of free space on the drive, APFS-Container and it's corresponding sub-sectioned partition structure architecture ensure most efficient technological storage. This simply did not exist in HFS + Am using Acronis 2021 to back up my MacBook Pro and at times the backup process reaches 700 to 800 MB a second, and it seems that the read speeds are increased as well in APFS.

 

[You’re not me]

Seagate makes the best drives available once you get away from consumer level drives.

 

[haralds]

Downsides to APFS:

1. No defrag. macOS will try to keep HFS+ defragged.
2. No recovery tools. I have not seen a lot of success with Disk Utility actually fixing APFS volumes after finding errors.
3. Some performance tests report it is slower on spinners than HFS+.
4. HFS+ is much more mature.

Advantages to APFS:

1. Container/Volume management is nice on large drives.
2. Copy using only metadata within the same volume.
3. Likely to be maintained.

If the external drive is mainly used for backup, fragmentation is likely not an issue. If it is big enough, you could clone volume to volume to defrag.