Convert APFS non-RAID to SoftRAID non-RAID

You cannot convert HFS to APFS, nor APFS to HFS.

Disk Utility can convert APFS to HFS, but there are no tools I am aware of to convert back. You can clone (Carbon Copy Cloner) to an HFS volume, but it is possible, depending on your APFS volume and how many "copies" of files you have, that the volume will not fit on the new disk.

An example is take a 10GB video file. Copy it 101 times on an APFS volume. This requires no additional space. But you cannot copy this volume to an HFS 1TB volume.

Not sure I understand, I am trying to convert an APFS volume to a SoftRAID volume, is that not allowed?

@dgiffin

Call it a feature that is not implemented at this time. It will be there in the future.

@softraid-support Ok, so it just means a couple of extra steps?

1) initialise a new SoftRAID non-RAID volume

2) Copy my data over from the Apple volume

3) Reinitialise the Apple volume as a SoftRAID volume

4) Combine the 2 SoftRAID volumes into RAID1

In a future beta, yes. B48 cannot convert to Mirror, however.

When we add APFS support in the user interface (working on that now), yes you will be able to do this.

Except the steps are:

3. Initialize disk with Apple Volume

4. "Convert to Mirror" and select the freshly initialized disk

5. Let it rebuild in the background.

It's been a while since this thread was last updated, but I've got a related problem with a server upgrade. I've migrated off of our HFS+ volume to a new SoftRAID initialized (non-RAID) APFS drive/volume, using rsync to just move all the files over and then swap volume names. I've re-initialized the old drive that had the HFS+ volume on it in order to use it as a mirror drive to my new APFS volume, but I'm finding a couple problems: 

1) new drive is just a tiny bit larger than old drive

2) can't "Resize" APFS volume to make it small enough to allow for the use of the older drive

3) Convert volume option is forever greyed out (presumably due to 1 and 2 above)

Are there plans to add the ability to Resize AFPS volumes? If not, I'm guessing that my only other option (short of buying more drives) is to Rsync all the data back onto the (smaller) old drive, formatted as a non-RAID APFS volume, Convert this volume to RAID using the other (slightly larger) drive as the secondary. Am I missing an obvious simpler approach?

@michaelprichard

I am guessing convert with APFS is not going to make it into 6.2, we will try, but need to have SoftRAID 6.2 released by the time Monterey is released.

You would need to delete/recreate the volume if you need to do this immediately, yes.

@softraid-support

Thanks for the quick reply. Just to confirm, the ability to Convert... the APFS volume _WILL_ appear once it sees that a large enough drive is available? And that this is the only reason it's not highlighted? I couldn't tell from the current docs of Convert... is currently supported for APFS volumes at all, so was just hoping for confirmation before embarking on the data migration path. 

@michaelprichard

there are two bugs here:

resize volume is not working yet with APFS volumes.

Convert to Mirror is not working yet for APFS.

We are working on both.