In recent days I’ve been doing a lot of erasing and partitioning, and guesstimate it now occurs about 10% of the time. Previously, this bizarre behaviour occurred frequently, and it seems to have become less common in macOS 12.4. Instead of showing a single container of 2 TB size, it shows two, with identical names and sizes, totalling 4 TB on the 2 TB disk. This 2 TB external disk has just been successfully erased to provide a single APFS volume.
Less serious, but more confusing, is a sporadic bug which displays bizarre results after a disk has been erased, or partitioned into two or more containers. The good news is that such failures don’t seem to occur any more on external disks which don’t contain a Time Machine backup volume. Yet nowhere does Apple warn that First Aid on APFS backup volumes is only available in Recovery. Since that article, my suggested workaround of unmounting volumes manually and using fsck_apfs has ceased working, as that command now fails to open the volume, reporting that the operation is not permitted. This is a serious failure, particularly as the message given to users is to “back up the data on this volume”, which is wholly inappropriate for a backup volume, and gives the false impression that failure is imminent.Īs I noted six months ago, these problems with unmounting containers and volumes for First Aid have persisted for over four years. If you need to run First Aid on an APFS Time Machine backup disk, the only methods available are to use Disk Utility or apfs_fsck in Recovery Mode.
Ironically, the only exceptions to this are HFS+ volumes, which can still be checked fully when on a disk containing an APFS backup volume.Įach time, the error message reports that the container holding the backup volume remains mounted, even though all volumes have been successfully unmounted, and Disk Utility also considers the container to be unmounted. macOS 12.4 now blocks all attempts to run First Aid on any volume or container on a disk containing an APFS backup volume, and the command tool fsck_apfs also refuses to oblige. In the past, a variety of errors have been blamed for this failure, but it has also been possible to work around it by manually ejecting the volume or container you want to check. This problem persists, although currently it now seems confined to APFS backup volumes. The most serious problem with Disk Utility remains its manifest inability to run First Aid on some volumes and containers, in particular Time Machine backup stores. This article considers where Disk Utility has got in those six months, and whether it’s less frustrating and more useful, less than a month before Apple announces macOS 13. Earlier this week, we updated to 12.4, which is getting close to the end of this cycle. It’s exactly six months since I last looked at the many problems plaguing Monterey’s Disk Utility.
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