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volume

What to do when macOS won’t let you unmount a volume

You’re in a rush to eject an external disk, but the Finder tells you it’s in use by unnamed apps. What should you do next, and what has Sloth to do with it?

January 24, 2025 Macs, Technology

How do APFS volume roles work?

What separates System and Data volumes, and how does macOS know they’re part of a boot volume group? What distinguished backup volumes, and what is Sidecar?

November 21, 2024 Macs, Technology

APFS: Log entries

How to obtain and read entries in the Unified log made by APFS. Their structure, and a guide to their identification and occurrence.

May 6, 2024 Macs, Technology

APFS: Encryption and sealing

Keybags, wrapping keys, VEKs and KEKs all explained. Did you realise how Recovery Keys are implemented? Or how the SSV protects against read errors?

April 11, 2024 Macs, Technology

APFS: Containers and volumes

From the GPT division of storage space, through APFS containers, down to individual volumes, an account of how APFS works.

April 2, 2024 Macs, Technology

Where does macOS get its volume free space figures from?

After studying thousand of log entries in less than 2 seconds, this is how macOS updates its values for purgeable and available space. But who uses them?

April 27, 2023 Macs, Technology

How APFS mounts encrypted volumes, snapshots, cryptexes and more

Details of what happens when an APFS (Encrypted) volume is mounted, when mounting a Time Machine snapshot, unmounting a volume, and loading a Cryptex.

April 3, 2023 Macs, Technology

How APFS mounts an external disk: 1 Basics

A step-by-step account of how Disk Arbitration and APFS mount an external disk, from handling its partitions, to performing trims.

March 30, 2023 Macs, Technology

Ventura volume layout

Updated charts of containers and volumes on boot volume groups for Ventura, with details of cryptexes and what they do.

October 25, 2022 Macs, Technology

How to make more use of your backup disk

APFS backup disks offer different possibilities for adding volumes for your own use, alongside the backup volume. How do you decide what’s best?

May 20, 2022 Macs, Technology

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