[2] With the release of the Mac OS X 10.2.2 update on November 11, 2002, Apple added optional journaling features to HFS Plus for improved data reliability.
[8] Mac OS X 10.3 introduced a number of techniques that are intended to avoid fragmentating files in HFS+.
[11] In Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, directory hard-linking was added as a fundamental part of Time Machine.
In Mac OS X Lion 10.7, logical volume encryption (known as FileVault 2) was added to the operating system.
HFS Plus's system greatly improves space utilization on larger disks as a result.
File and folder names in HFS Plus are also encoded in UTF-16[13] and normalized to a form very nearly the same as Unicode Normalization Form D (NFD)[14] (which means that precomposed characters like "å" are decomposed in the HFS+ filename and therefore count as two code units[15] and UTF-16 implies that characters from outside the Basic Multilingual Plane also count as two code units in an HFS+ filename).
This was phased out by the Tiger transition to Intel Macs, where the HFS Plus file system was not embedded inside a wrapper.
[22] Consequently, Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu stopped allowing mounting of HFS+ drives or partitions greater than 2 TB.
[24] [needs update] Under Linux's current HFS+ driver, journaling must be disabled in order to write data safely onto an HFS+ partition.
Provided the partition isn't being used by Apple's Time Machine software, journaling can be disabled under macOS:[25] Using Disk Utility in OS X Yosemite, the user may hold Alt/Option and click "Disable Journaling" on the File menu, having first selected a mounted partition.
An HFS+ partition with journaling enabled may be forcibly mounted with write access under Linux, but this is unsupported and unwise.
[25][26] A Google Summer of Code project to implement write support to journaled HFS+[27] was accepted by the Linux Foundation in 2011 but was not completed at that time and is still a work in progress.
As of July 2011[update], Paragon Software Group provided kernel drivers that allow full read-write access to HFS+ journaled volumes.
[citation needed] A free and opensource software – jHFSplus, based on HFSExplorer and jpfm – can be used to mount hfs/hfs+ partitions as read-only virtual folders.
[36] A commercial product, MacDrive, is also available for mounting HFS and HFS+ drives, optical discs, and other media in Windows Explorer, and allows both reading and writing to the volume, as well as repairing and formatting Mac disks.