Apologies if I use incorrect nomenclature. I have an SSD (Samsung T-7, if it matters). It has a partition formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and one APFS container (with four APFS volumes, if it matters). I would like to delete the Mac OS Extended partition without disturbing the APFS container.
If I select the Mac OS Extended partition in the sidebar, the minus sign at the top of the Disk Utility window is grayed out. Is there some other way to delete the partition? If not, could I copy the four APFS volumes to another SSD, reformat the problematic SSD such that it has only an APFS container, create four volumes, and copy the four volumes back? (I do have sufficient space on another SSD to create volumes, but I would need to create them.) Is there a less painful path?
Three of the four volumes contain data-only clones, created by Carbon Copy Cloner, of three distinct volumes. Does that pose any problem? The fourth volume is encrypted (and I have the password). Does that pose any problem?
I’m thinking you mean you have a volumedrive that has two partitions: one is Mac OS Extended, the other is APFS.
If so, make sure Disk Utility has View > Show All Devices checked, then click one level up from the Mac OS Extended partition. Then click on Partition in the toolbar. From here you can select the Mac OS Extended partition and - it.
You should not have to reformat the SSD.
If you have questions, post a screenshot of what you’re seeing.
Edit: Oops, I was wrong in so many ways. Now I’m going to lose all my geek points.
I typically have Disk Utility set to Show All Devices, but I changed it to Show Only Volumes and it showed five volumes: the Mac OS Extended that I want to delete and the four APFS volumes that reside in one container. With Disk Utility set to Show All Devices, one level up from the Mac OS Extended volume is the physical SSD, as is one level up from the APFS container (which is one level up from each APFS volume).
In Show All Devices view, I selected the SSD (one level up from the Mac OS Extended volume, as you said). I then clicked on Partition in the toolbar and got the window shown below. The - was gray; clicking it had no effect.
You can only remove partitions from the end of the disk, not the beginning. All you can do with the Mac OS Extended partition is to erase it and reformat it. You can’t merge it into the existing APFS partition/container.
It is certainly possible to copy all folders and files to a spare disk, reformat, create volumes and copy back. But simple copies using Finder and drag and drop will lose some data metadata and any permissions you have specified. It will also lose some of the space saving benefits that CCC brings (sparse files, file APFS clones).
When you say they were created by CCC, are they one off backups of data? Or do they have APFS snapshots from repeated CCC backups to the same APFS volume. It will be nearly impossible to keep the snapshots. So, yes, there are potential problems from being CCC volumes.
If the volumes contain CCC backups which include any system files or ~/Library you are almost certain to lose at least some metadata and probably some files and folders.
Encrypted volumes are not an issue (so long as you know the passwords).
I am sorry, but your first sentence is going to confuse. @Will_M was correct in his description of a disk/drive/SSD with two partitions - one partition being formatted HFS+ and the other partition formatted as an APFS container with four APFS volumes inside it…
Yeah, you’re right. And I forgot about trying to delete a partition from the beginning of the disk; it is has been so long since I’ve run into that issue.
On Windows this was solved by Partition Magic: it would remove the partition you didn’t want, move the other partition over and make it bigger, all without losing any data. Magic!
They are infrequent (rarely as often as four days, occasionally more than two weeks) backups of infrequently used primary volumes. However, space is not an issue. When you say it would be nearly impossible (and I’m sure that means impossible for me) to keep snapshots, does that mean the snapshot gets expanded (so I still have the full backup, but taking up much more space) or does that mean the backup is lost?
I don’t think I care about metadata (I’m a fairly light-duty user), but feel free to tell me why I would. Thanks again.
Much depends on how you have CCC configured. For each backup volume, each time CCC runs, has a) CCC created a new clean backup to an empty volume, or b) CCC created a new snapshot to the previous backup. If (a), you can just copy with Finder. If (b) you can copy particular snapshots with Finder - each will require its own disk space.
Metadata you will lose includes folder creation and modification dates, some file dates and any extended attributes (e.g. Finder tags). This may or may not be important to you.
Really? That’s pretty weird. I can understand not being able to move/expand the APFS container, but deleting a partition should, in the worst case, leave a “hole” of unpartitioned space that can be used to create other partitions. I wonder why Apple made this design decision.
Yep. And on Linux, the gparted utility will do this without needing to buy any additional software.
You can remove partitions at the end and expand the “previous” partition into it. Or you could say partition n+1 can be deleted and partition n expanded.
The partition at the beginning can’t be removed, but can be reused by reformatting. So it is not really a “hole”. Nuisance, I agree.
The will always be exceptions, but as a general rule Mac disks are most flexibly used by making the whole disk a single APFS partition and placing multiple volumes inside.
I suspect that the limitations in Disk Utility are to keep things simple and do not define what can and can’t be done with other tools.
Someone with more practical experience would know whether you can use gparted on a disk formatted with APFS partitions. Best partition managers for Mac covers 6 partition managers some of which specify support for APFS.
I am unclear about the use of the word “clone” in this case. Does “clone” mean a more or less exact copy of the source to the destination? In which case your scenario would probably be fine. Or is @Will_M using “clone” more generally to mean the destination of a CCC backup - in this case there may be APFS snapshots. If there are snapshots it is straight forward to preserve the most recent snapshot, but impossible (or impractical) to preserve multiple snapshots.
@gilby101 I meant clone to refer to whatever CCC is creating/maintaining for you. I use CCC to “clone” a complete bootable copy of my machine’s main drive onto an external drive every night, so that’s what came to mind. My main thought is really to make use of CCC’s capabilities. A fresh clone is up to date - no need for snapshots. Once the SSD is refreshed and the CCC clones re-created on it, snapshots will again begin accumulating as CCC incrementally updates. In my experience CCC’s snapshots are not for looking up past versions of files as in Apple’s Time Machine, btw. They’re just to keep the “clone” current without having to re-copy the entire original source each time. My suggested steps above avoid any issues with manually copying or moving CCC files to avoid issues with CCC snapshots, among other reasons, as you point out.
@bva I must admit I find giving advice on CCC tricky unless I know exactly how CCC tasks (backups, clones, or whatever) have been configured - in particular snapshots or not. I use CCC’s snapshot capability with all my CCC tasks. They do work just like Time Machine snapshots providing access to past versions of files.
If you mean an exact copy of the physical media’s blocks, then no. CCC does not produce “image” backups like this.
CCC “clones” a volume by copying all (or a configured subset of) files from a source volume to a destination volume, just like most backup utilities do.
If the source has existing snapshots, it makes no attempt to copy all of the snapshots to the destination. It only backs up the active/mounted volume to the destination.
CCC’s use of snapshots is:
If the source volume is APFS, it makes a snapshot at the start of the backup process and copies files from that snapshot, in order to protect against active files changing during the backup. It deletes that snapshot when the backup completes.
If the destination volume is APFS and SafetyNet is enabled, it will make a snapshot of the destination before the backup begins (to protect existing files) and will delete old snapshots according to your configured retention policy. Then the backup runs and afterward, it creates another snapshot to protect it against subsequent file changes.
I don’t think so. Apple doesn’t document ASR, but I am pretty sure that it makes file-level copies, then does the work necessary to construct a bootable SSV snapshot from the cloned system volume.
The reason I believe this is beause ASR does not require the source and destination devices to be the same size, and it does not preserve snapshots on the source volume. Both of which would have to be true in order to perform a block-level clone.
It’s fairly general. For each pairing, I tell CCC to copy the entire contents of a data-only APFS volume to a dedicated data-only APFS backup volume, with SafetyNet enabled, and I have done this with the same source and destination volumes many times over a several-month period. All sources and destinations are volumes on multiple-volume SSDs. I used the word “clone” because that’s what it says on the button I click in CCC.
Do you mean copy the backup volumes to temporary volumes using CCC, then (after formatting the SSD that’s causing all the trouble) copy them from the temporary volumes to the newly created (and future) backup volumes, again using CCC? I can do that. Would that preserve snapshots or metadata?
What do you see in CCC when you (in left sidebar) select “Volumes” and then your CCC destination volume? Are there many snapshots on the right hand side? (Mine have up to 50 or so).
The suggested copying steps will only preserve a particular snapshot - by default the most recent.
