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by hollander 3061 days ago
How long does it take to reformat 300TB of disk? I guess the most time it takes is the restore from backup, because that seems to be the safest and easiest way to do this. But I might be wrong here.

I can see the problem here, and it's annoying that Apple doesn't handle this better, and doesn't give you any insights whether they will solve this or not. But I'm pretty sure that reformatting solves this problem for him a lot faster than waiting for a bugfix.

2 comments

To move 300TB (say, restoring a backup) at an optimistic 300MB/s would take just under two weeks.
Can you not use OSX to perform the conversion for you in place?[1] There should also be a `diskutil` command that does it as well. Then you get snapshots and better volume management.

As always do your research first, this conversion is a one-way thing.

[1] https://datarecovery.wondershare.com/apfs/how-to-convert-hfs...

My information is that reformatting HFS+ to APFS is only a matter of seconds or minutes because what is mostly replaced is metadata (not the real data). So going from Sierra to High Sierra should be no problem with reformatting, but going back is a big problem then ;)