Disk First Aid error on startup volume Data

TidBITS Talk
1

Here is an excerpt from the Disk Utility’s First Aid on my startup volume on my MacBook Air (M1, 2020) running macOS Big Sur 11.7.10.

Performing fsck_apfs -n -l -x /dev/rdisk3s5
Checking the container superblock.
warning: container has been mounted by APFS version 2235.0.13, which is newer than 1677.141.3.7.2
warning: disabling overallocation repairs by default; use -o to override

What does the first warning mean? I don’t do fancy things; how would I get a conflict in APFS versions? Is the second warning anything concerning? Thanks.

2

Are you booted from macOS Recovery? I could imagine that somehow being newer than Big Sur.

If I were helping a friend with this, I’d recommend updating to Sonoma before worrying about it. Big Sur is old enough at this point that Apple has had lots of time to update APFS and Disk Utility in significant ways.

3

No; regular login as a non-admin user.

That’s on my To Do list, but between higher priority* items and travels, it won’t happen until mid-October at the earliest.

*The error message is a low priority. The only reason I was running First Aid was a random hope that it would solve my Time Machine backup issue (about which you already recommended Sonoma and that’s why it was on my To Do list). Since Time Machine seems to back up everything that I care about (and I have other backup strategies), fixing Time Machine is a low priority. When I saw the First Aid error message, I wondered what it was about, but I have not noticed any anomalous behavior that I would attribute to disk activities.

4

That could be the problem. I would think that you couldn’t do disk maintenance without administrator privilege.

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5

Thanks. I’ve made a note to use First Aid the next time I login as admin. But neither of those errors give me a hint that it might be an issue with a normal user rather than admin (not that I would recognize such a hint).

6

When I ran First Aid while logged in as an administrator, I got the same errors.

warning: container has been mounted by APFS version 2235.0.13, which is newer than 1677.141.3.7.2
warning: disabling overallocation repairs by default; use -o to override

It seems to me (and I’m nothing close to an expert) that if a user can trigger a Time Machine backup, which (as I understand it) backs up other users’ data, then a user could run First Aid. I assume macOS protects what needs to be protected and lets the task run (and the important word is assume).

7

For a long time, when running Disk Utility>First Aid on the boot/user volumes MacOS would complain that it couldn’t do everything it needed to. As a result I got into the habit of booting from MacOS Recovery and running DU>FA from there, then rebooting normally. Note that sometimes I have needed to run FA on the container while in Recovery, not just the volumes. This might address your error message. See my earlier discussion on how to do this.

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