[Off-Topic] Where Can I get Help with macOS Sierra Issues?

Excellent question, and excellent replies -- all very helpful.

FWIW, I upgraded my MBP-15R (2013) to Sierra last week, and so far so good -- no issues. And I'm really liking the Sierra features.

P.S. I'm probably the last person on the planet to upgrade to Sierra. LOL

Sierra was good but, be aware of High Sierra if you are using an SSD drive to install it on.

I installed my first SSD drive and I am very happy I did that. While it probably does speed up the opening and the access of my applications and files, I have already gotten so used to the difference it is hard to notice anymore. The biggest reason for me that I still notice every day is that the restart time has reduced dramatically. When I think of the times it was easier to just leave it running when I had to trouble shoot some odd glitch that a restart might have helped, or doing routine maintenance or, installing an update to Little Snitch or another app, now it will restart in such a short time that is no longer a hassle at all.

I discovered a problem though, High Sierra will automatically and without warning reformat your SSD drive to Apples new file system, APFS. One of my long time disk maintenance utilities, DiskWarrior will no longer see my SSD drive as it can't yet work with the APFS file system. Alsoft says they are working hard on updating DiskWarrior but they blame Apple as Apple has been very slow to release final specs in their APFS system so Alsoft can finish tweaking their product.

If I had been aware of this I would not have upgraded to High Sierra. At least, not yet.

In the meantime you can also use fsck_hfs to rebuild your file system catalog:

To rebuild the catalog b-tree:

fsck_hfs -r <target volume>

To rebuild all b-trees:

fsck_hfs -Race <target volume>

(a= Attribute btree, c= Catalog btree, e= Extents overflow btree; see man page)

I’ve run the latter succesfully on HFS Time Machine drives, where fsck -fy frequently fails (probably due to the enormous amount of hard-linked folders).

Have you tried this yet on an SSD formatted in Apples new APFS in High Sierra? I know I have used these commands in the past but .. I was waiting for the smoke to clear before 100% trusting old ways. Right now I run a backup every week on a normal (non SSD and there fore HFS formatted disk). Then, I point DiskWarrior at the fresh back up so at least in case of disaster I have a clean boot.

No, this is only for HFS. It seems fsck_apfs doesn’t (yet) have a rebuild switch.

But one of the main points of APFS is to be more robust than HFS, so I doubt that it will be necessary to rebuild a APFS volume (at least in the next couple of months or so).

And once Apple comes up with a APFS-compatible Time Machine storage system, the old repair problems will hopefully be gone, since APFS doesn’t allow folder hard links, AFAIK.

I know, Apple likes to say that. You aren't supposed to need to defragment your disks either but sometimes, you still do. I mean, it’s a great idea if it works. I still like to do what I do to make sure everything is what and where it should be. When did Apple go from "think different" to, "don't think for yourselves".

Well, if the new file system turns out to be less or equally robust than the old one (which was pretty fragile), then this would be a very, very huge fail.

I do know that Apple is capable of comitting significant fails, but if I believed that their new file system is worse than the old one, then I would probably already have stopped buying Apple products :wink:

Honestly, I stopped doing this 6 or 8 years ago.

The reason is that the OS automatically defragments any file under 20MB on a HFS volume[1]. So, under normal cirumstances, it really wasn’t necessary. (An exception may be if you are doing very heavy video work.) On SSDs it is pointless anyway.


[1]: For the exact conditions see here. Scroll down to “Built-in Measures in Mac OS X Against Fragmentation”.