Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
snapshot
Time Machine has been using snapshots since High Sierra. How can it then use them to make backups to APFS volumes in Big Sur?
Here are several good reasons that Big Sur will need more storage space than previous versions of macOS.
Trying to discover the effective size of a snapshot proves baffling, particularly when the Finder claims it’s almost astronomical.
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?
From SIP to a protected read-only System volume, macOS 11 takes system protection a big step further with cryptographic verification.
Without addressing shortcomings in tools and maturity of macOS, 10.16 has flawed foundations, and is likely to fall flat.
Do you have VMs or other large files, and use Time Machine for backups? Here’s how to make those backups quicker and more compact.
If a Time Machine snapshot can’t be thinned, nothing warns you of the problem, and without Terminal or the log you can’t even find out.
What does your Mac get up to when you’re away from it? Mine was busy writing hundreds of thousands of entries in the log because of a couple of snapshots.
