"So, before installing 10.13, I started off by googling for any problems experienced by people installing and upgrading filesystems during the process using the public betas. To my surprise there were none."
Well, my quick visit to developer discussions forum at Apple website related to macOs Beta quickly revealed a lot of people with the problems. It seems like the author didn't look too far:
That link shows discussions related to problems with the OS but it doesn't list any problems with the filesystem upgrade. If it does, they might have been bumped down by more recent posts but the only major issue (and the person posting it admits that they changed some permissions) is a read-only drive. That seems like pretty good odds.
If you go beyond the first page you will see more, including data loss after a few days of usage and during setup.
I'm not trying to be negative, I was just pointing out the results of my own research into this question when I was considering to try High Sierra beta. It's not "zero issues" as the original author wrote.
Mind linking to one? I can't find anything that has data loss in the subject and most of the other threads are not about APFS. The only one I can still see is regarding a kernel panic but it doesn't give any details, just an assumption that the issue is with APFS.
All of those, bar one, are from previous versions (not the latest GM) of High Sierra, and then it's not certain that that was what they were using. So granted, you have managed to find up to one case of what you were saying.
When I first tried installing the second developer (first public) beta, the install failed during the FS conversion, my computer was left in an unbootable state and I had to wipe my drive, reinstall the os (to be clear, the beta and APFS again) and restore from backups. No significant problems after that, but that's sort of a how-did-Mrs-Lincoln-like-the-play type thing.
Yep, there are a ton of bugs in High Sierra. I think this is going to be a risky upgrade for a lot of Macs. From video drivers not being ready to ship to weird issues with permissions and APFS, there is going to be a long tail of misery and issues on the 25th.
Well, my quick visit to developer discussions forum at Apple website related to macOs Beta quickly revealed a lot of people with the problems. It seems like the author didn't look too far:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/community/beta/macos-1013...