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Big Sur boot volume layout

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Detailed account of disk, volume and folder layouts on Big Sur’s boot disks, complete with roadmaps which are downloadable as PDFs.

January 13, 2021 Macs, Technology

Boot disk layout on Intel and M1 Macs: High Sierra to Big Sur

Diagrams of the layout of volumes on boot disks for macOS 10.13 to 11, covering both Intel and M1 models.

January 9, 2021 Macs, Technology

Wrangling file paths in Catalina and Big Sur

Volume layouts are fairly straightforward until you have two or more bootable systems with Volume Groups. Details and advice for those with macOS 10.15 or 11.

November 9, 2020 Macs, Technology

There’s more to files than data: Attributes

Explaining inodes, names, dates, permissions, file types, and specialised attributes used for iCloud.

October 22, 2020 Macs, Technology

Boot volume layout

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A complete guide to the structure and layout of APFS startup disks from High Sierra to Big Sur (Intel), together with tear-out PDF charts.

September 16, 2020 Macs, Technology

Limits to size of sparse bundles, and bugs fixed in Spundle 1.2

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Important update for all users, which addresses several bugs in setting the maximum size of sparse bundles.

June 22, 2020 Macs, Technology

Selecting sizes for sparse bundles

How to set the total size, and band size, for your sparse bundles, with calculation of the critical band size.

June 18, 2020 Macs, Technology

Getting more out of metadata

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Five different classes of metadata, from file system attributes to embedded Info.plist files, explained and explored.

May 6, 2020 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: How Time Machine backups waste space

How your Mac’s security and privacy systems can cause duplicate copies of files to be written to your backups.

March 29, 2020 Macs, Technology

What changes a file’s modification date, and what doesn’t?

Do changing permissions or an extended attribute also alter a file’s modification date?

March 27, 2020 Macs, Technology

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