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.
diskutil
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.
There’s no more critical app on your Mac, yet Disk Utility has suffered years of neglect – years in which APFS has grown many new features, and all Disk Utility gets is bugs and workaround.
Disk Utility in Big Sur can turn a 1 TB external disk into 4.5 TB or more of imaginary containers. Sadly it’s just a bug, and here’s how to work around it.
We don’t know when Apple decided to introduce Big Sur’s SSV, but even now it hasn’t told users it won’t be releasing standalone updates for 11.0.1 or 11.1.
How can you tell whether your Mac’s shiny new Sealed System Volume is properly sealed? You could easily be misled into thinking it isn’t.
Disk Utility can’t image APFS volumes, and normally returns an error if you try to image a container. Here’s the workaround.
If something goes wrong with Catalina’s boot Volume Group, it seems there’s no way to repair it, or change the Data volume. Or is there?
Updating Big Sur can cause the storage required by the system to double in size. Snapshots appear to be the cause. What’s the solution?
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