Well, I did it. I know that I've told many people I'd be waiting until Thanksgiving to apply the High Sierra upgrade to my own production machine, but after some reflection this week, I decided that High Sierra was ready for me, and that I was ready for High Sierra. I've always been decidedly anti-upgrade when it comes to my own production system. Upgrades tend to break things, and I just can't afford downtime on my laptop. High Sierra and the APFS transition, to me, was a potential double-whammy for breaking things, so I was bearish on this upgrade in particular. But today, we're ready.
I didn't make this decision lightly. The scientist in me kicked into gear and I started analyzing some data. I looked at new OS adoption among our user base, I looked at our Help Desk analytics, and I considered the experiences of the users that I've been helping over the past several weeks. As I predicted early in the summer, the APFS conversions have largely gone just fine. This is probably at least partially attributable to Apple backing off on applying the new format to Fusion and AppleRAID devices, but I think some credit to Apple is due here. They pulled this off! The upgrade hasn't been flawless, but based on the feedback that we've received from our users, largely it has gone fine, and anecdotally I think it has gone better than past OS upgrades.
OS adoption among CCC 4 and CCC 5 users
Looking at just the last week, I can see that approximately a quarter of CCC users have upgraded to High Sierra. Sierra remains the dominant OS choice, but I think we'll see that flip in the next three to four weeks; perhaps once the 10.13.1 release is posted.
CCC rises to the APFS challenge
So how did CCC do with the upgrade? In the 16-year history of Mac OS X, High Sierra was the first OS upgrade to introduce a new, bootable filesystem format, so obviously that posed a challenge to the bootable backup solution. In just four months, we picked apart the boot semantics of this new filesystem, added format-agnostic support to CCC 5, tested dozens of source/destination filesystem combinations, assembled numerous pages of support documentation and several new Help videos – CCC was ready for APFS when High Sierra shipped on September 25.
I don't want to be the guy that hoists a "Mission Accomplished" banner too early, but looking back at the last several weeks, we were more prepared for this OS release than any major new OS in the past. We've seen great success making HFS and APFS bootable backups on High Sierra. Our statistics show thousands of confirmed High Sierra bootable backups using both APFS and HFS (roughly 40/60 split), and based on user feedback on our... Read More