How should you restore a whole volume, or an old version of a document to a different folder? Includes details of backup structure.
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Detailed account and explanation of the sequence of phases during an automatic backup in Sonoma 14.0 and 14.1, with tear-out chart.
First released 16 years ago, it was destined for Time Capsules, and relied on hard links in HFS+. It soon used APFS snapshots, and now uses them as the basis for its backups.
Two problems undermine Disk Utility’s First Aid: it persisting bug in failing to unmount volumes to check and repair, and its default omission of containers. And errors in APFS seem to be on the rise.
Should you just try to upgrade in the hope that your Mac’s storage has sufficient free space? What can you do to free up a bit more if needed?
What’s in APFS, and what are its tools? How to interpret the version number, and what do we know has changed with different versions? How compatible are they?
When you’ve worked out which files or folders are causing errors in APFS, what can you do to ensure they don’t recur?
Disk errors threaten your data: how to detect them, how to use First Aid in Disk Utility, how to use fsck, and what to do with the disk afterward.
How does copy on write work, and how do clones grow apart? What effect do they have on the use of space and performance?
Deleting two large files from a volume triggered the updating of figures for purgeable and available space within 9 seconds. Yet 6 minutes later, the Finder didn’t show those updated figures.
The Eclectic Light Company 