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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm glad to see even the cynics can't find an evil motive here, and has to resort to just assuming stupidity.

That, however, isn't easy to do, considering Apple has a rather impressive track record of creating products people enjoy and buy.

And to jump two replies ahead: them trying to make it "easy" and "save" doesn't imply their users are idiots. Quite a few developers and scientists use Macs, and the lawyers aren't exactly dumb either. Spending hours trying to somehow get both sound and bluetooth to work at the same time, a favourite pastime on Linux, means lifetime wasted for something that shouldn't need doing. And considering nobody reads the source, there is no reason to believe some "expert" has some ability to avoid installing that one extension that soon starts encrypting their files. At least they tend to have better backups...

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Ironically, kexts allow me to have better backups in the first place. APFS won’t check for bit rot, nor does it allow to make snapshots. OpenZFS enables both, and works with a kext. I don’t know whether Apple will allow that use case in the future.

I don’t like the way this is going.

You can definitely make snapshots on APFS. It also use checksums for filesystem integrity.

> You can definitely make snapshots on APFS.

Apple can. I can’t. Making APFS snapshots requires special entitlements, which they’re not going to give me.

> It also use checksums for filesystem integrity.

It doesn’t check integrity of the actual data though. But I care about my data.

You can use tmutil to create a snapshot.

Or do you want to create an app that performs a snapshot via some API.

One does not simply create an APFS snapshot using tmutil. Using tmutil means Time Machine creates a snapshot for me. It also conveniently earmarks the snapshot for later removal at Time Machine’s own discretion.

That’s not what I want. I want to have a say in snapshot retention, not have some tool make the decision for me.

Specifically, I need precise control over snapshot retention so I can maintain several off-site replicas of my backup.

> Apple can. I can’t. Making APFS snapshots requires special entitlements, which they’re not going to give me.

What makes you think that? Carbon Copy Cloner does this, and is made by a small independent developer.

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/leveraging-snapshots-on-apfs-vol...

They have managed to obtain the special entitlement.

Source: https://bombich.com/blog/2018/03/30/building-better-backups-...

They’re one of two apps in the world who have been granted the entitlement as far as I know. The other one is Time Machine.

APFS does NOT checksum the same as ZFS. APFS relies on the SSD controller to checksum/safeguard data. Which is fine so long as all your data is on SSD :p

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