Apple could have chosen to make APFS open source or to document it fully, to help third parties develop maintenance tools. It chose not to, but Disk Utility still doesn’t work as it should.
diskutil
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 macOS 12.4, it’s impossible to run First Aid on any container or APFS volume on a disk with a Time Machine APFS backup volume, except in Recovery.
We used to repair permissions of the system until SIP. After a short break, we often repaired them again, this time on preference files. Why did Apple cancel that? Should we still try it for fixing problems?
Explains the identifiers, sizes and tidemark data shown for snapshots in Disk Utility, in Monterey.
New for Monterey: Disk Utility now offers complete features for the management and maintenance of snapshots.
The differences between HFS+ and APFS volumes explored. What a container is, and how to add new HFS+ and APFS volumes to a disk.
Why deleting either the System or Data volume, but not the whole Volume Group, could get your Mac into trouble in macOS 11 or 12.
Given their very different structure, backups on APFS disks shouldn’t require routine maintenance. Checking and repair is performed using Disk Utility.
Until Big Sur started backing up to snapshots on APFS, there was little interest in being able to copy snapshots. Now we realise that we can’t.
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