Gads! Not having a bootable backup is a bit (a big bit) of a game changer for me, e.g., I may delay updating to High Sierra until Carbon Copy Cloner (or SD!) gets theses issues resolved.
And I fear DiskWarrior will also have issues with APFS.
<rant>
In the interim, I will probably install High Sierra on what would normally be my clone drive then eithe clone my regular boot drive to a sparse image file on that drive or simply rely on Time Machine to keep my data recoverable.
As for Diskwarrior, Drive Genius, Techtool Pro,
et. al. SMART reporting, surface scans, and any hardware tests should remain unchanged; file and/or volume optimization of APFS volumes would be pointless at best or even counter productive, volume repair of APFS volumes could range anywhere from a few simple tweaks to a completely new from scratch rewrite.
On the other hand as of last Friday I have had two rotating rust
hardware failures in the past month and it has been at least three or four years since I have needed repair the volume structure of a drive. So Diskwarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro repair features Have not been of any value. In fairness, the TTP SMART check detected two out of the last three drive failures and SoftRAID detected the other, but neither utility can repair hardware failures. My point is hardware failure is proving significantly more frequent than software (volume/directory structure) damage. APFS is unlikely to change that and just may make volume/directory structure damage even less common.
COMMENT: I have long touted surface scans as the best means of detecting impending drive failure but TechTool Pro SMART reporting that shows each of the SMART parameters individually instead of the aggregate pass/fail or verified/not verified together with a little informed interpretation on the part of the user is causing me to re-examine my thesis. I still contend Disk Utility's verified/non-verified report, also used be many other utilities is useless for anything other than confirming the drive has already failed.
