Have to agree, my biggest concern for putting it off was APFS so I waited until no one complained about it for long enough thinking 'everything else should still be ok' - big mistake. Stay away until Schiller praises the 'stability' release at 2018 Developer Conference.
I think it’s APFS that’s the cause of my biggest frustration, but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about. I normally run with about 50gb free space. After three to four days, I’m normally down to about 3gb and nothing will get it to show back up, other than a reboot.
I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.
Yes, this is likely the reason: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015, and maybe (due to bug or by design) these snapshots are enabled always, even if backup partition is not configured.
> In macOS High Sierra, Time Machine stores snapshots on every APFS-formatted, all-flash storage device in your Mac or directly connected to your Mac.
time machine local backups cannot be disabled anymore (was possible in sierra). these backups are going to a hidden volume and can be listed with the tmutil(8) command. it is not possible to delete all local snapshots with a single command either, the delete subcommand takes a single date...
for this reason i do only on-demand backups when i connect my external backup drive.
another worrying thing is that the time machine backup drives still use HFS+ because APFS does not support directory hard links. so now i am backing up APFS files to HFS+ "bit perfectly".
my worry is backing up from FS A to FS B where these file systems are not feature equal. just the fact that you cannot use APFS to backup APFS is worrying to me.
I converted main partition on hard disk to APFS and now it's very slow. I know I shouldn't use it on hard disks, but installer (which updates 10.12 to 10.13) crashed otherwise, leaving system unbootable (booting to installer again). After converting root partition to APFS installer was able to complete installation.
Not sure, however, that APFS is the reason of slowdown, maybe other filesystems are slow too in this version. FS cache, however, still works, and after warmup system becomes fairly responsive (on 16 Gb of RAM).
I had an issue with “purgable” space on a non-APFS system preventing me from creating a Bootcamp partition. Probably not what you describe but thought it was worth a mention. Followed this guide to “fix” it: https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-purgeable-remove-clear-spa.... Wasn’t best impressed.
the 'missing space' has hit me a few times over the years, but the highsierra/apfs made it worse. it will often slowly reclaim the space. I've deleted a multigig file, and, say, 30-40 minutes later, the space shows as 'available'. 2016 apple refurb SSD (2015 mbp model). It's all their own hardware and software, and it's buggy (or now designed to be confusing re: disk space).
They totally have f...ed up the free space indicators. It used it be that when I deleted things the indicator reflected it exactly. Now my indicator goes from 150 to 220 GB up and down for no apparent reason. I really have no idea how much free space I have exactly.
Use lsof to look for deleted files which are still open. I’ve debugged that problem with third-party software (AV, backups) a few times over the years.
Apple has really been eroding their geek cred with their latest OS releases. It's going to take some time to build that goodwill again, and so far they've acted like nothing is wrong.
