Should I be worried about a case-sensitive data volume?
I've got a late-2014 27-inch Retina iMac with a 3TB fusion drive. It's at my workplace, which I haven't been to in over a year as I write this in mid-2021. For various reasons, the machine needed the disk to be reformatted and have macOS reinstalled, which was done in person by a very helpful IT person at work. It is currently at macOS Big Sur 11.3.1.
However, for reasons that are opaque to me, the IT person seems to have formatted the main system data volume (MacHD - Data, which is mounted as /System/Volumes/Data) as Case-Sensitive APFS. This is certainly not the default, although it hasn't given me any issues that I know about. (Indeed, I only realised it because I ran homebrew's brew doctor command which informed me.)
So:
- Should I be worried?
- Is there anything I can do about it short of wiping the disk and reformatting yet again (which I am loathe to do for obvious reasons).
Update: I have discovered that at least one piece of software that I occasionally use does not work: Microsoft’s OneDrive — I can’t put the synced folder on a case-sensitive volume. (I don’t particularly like OneDrive, but I occasionally need it for work — and the application proper is easier to use than the web interface.)
Solution 1:
An example of a typical problem is Adobe's Creative Suite/Cloud software, which famously does not work on case-sensitive volumes.
Other than errors arising from /Path/To/File being different from /path/to/file, there is no inherent danger in using a case-sensitive format.
I'd be more concerned about a 7-year-old hard drive in that Fusion drive!