What should we know about APFS specialfiles?

We may have been using APFS for nearly seven years, but some of its features remain thoroughly opaque. On Christmas Day, I posed the puzzle of 60 TB of snapshots being removed from a 2 TB disk. While we all accept that may be technically correct", for ordinary users it makes no sense. Suggestions that they should be educated" miss the point that the Finder has to be accessible to all users, whether or not they have a degree in Computer Science. If my eleven year-old granddaughter can't make sense of it, then the Finder is a failure.

Today I turn to another thorny issue raised by the ingenuity of APFS: the size of its special file types, sparse and clone' files. As usual, I start with a practical demonstration.

Howard Oakley

I feel like I should ring a little bell while posting a link to this article.