From High Sierra’s four-volume group to macOS 12 on Apple silicon with three containers and 11 volumes, and both regular and fallback Recovery volumes.
container
APFS backup disks offer different possibilities for adding volumes for your own use, alongside the backup volume. How do you decide what’s best?
In Monterey, these haven’t changed much since Big Sur. However, those small differences are significant, particularly on M1 Macs.
The differences between HFS+ and APFS volumes explored. What a container is, and how to add new HFS+ and APFS volumes to a disk.
Disk structure diagrammed for comparison, from the partition table, to HFS+ and APFS volumes, with further references.
What you need to know about the APFS file system, its containers and volumes, so you can understand errors and how to repair them.
What you need to know about disk formatting using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) to understand its problems and how to repair it.
Apple says that if you run First Aid on a disk, each of its volumes is checked too. Is that really true?
Disk Utility can’t image APFS volumes, and normally returns an error if you try to image a container. Here’s the workaround.
The volume should only be half full, but installers and other software complains there’s insufficient free space. What to do.
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