I gave been having some slowdowns in my system and this morning it would not respond to the login password. I rebooted and went to the recovery screen. The drive aid will check out OK at all levels but when I try to do a Disk Aid on the Container level, it will hang with the POD. Do I need to recover from a time machine backup, reinstall the OS or just boot into the main desktop and try it again from there? Mac Studio M1
After 30 minutes it finished. Possibly false alarm, but very limited options with which to address when things like this arise. Disk Aid appears to be the only game in town.
- Make sure you give Disk Utility lots of time to complete. Inspecting an APFS volume can take a long time, because it will need to inspect every snapshot (a typical system’s Data volume will have 24 hourly local-Time-Machine snapshots, all of which need to be inspected).
- If Disk First Aid doesn’t find or fix anything, reformatting is unlikely to help. But if you have a good backup, it can’t hurt - you’ll just take a long time to restore from it later.
- It is possible that the SSD itself is failing, In which case, nothing you do can help. If the computer is under AppleCare, see if you can get Apple to replace it. If not, you may need to start booting from an external SSD or get a new computer.
Doing a volume with snapshots (or a container containing such a volume) could easily take this long.
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Ray, it sounds as if you’ve filing system errors, critical ones, on that internal drive – fsck via Disk Utility is pretty good, but an initialisation & OS reinstall is better.
A critical thing though if you haven’t a second Mac set up (semi) identically – if you do zap your drive with Disk Utility from Recovery, and reinstall the OS there, you want to use Migration Assistant to bring that computer up to speed again don’t you!
So before you do initialise, grab SuperDuper and clone your Mac on to an SSD. Once you’ve reinstalled the OS use that SSD as your source with Migration Assistant. You’ll have the Mac back up and running in a few minutes!
All the best with this!!
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Before any nuke and pave operation, always make sure you have at least two current backups. Just in case restoring from one should fail.
Before I do any major updates on my Mac, I make two clones (using CCC) and then force Time Machine to make a new snapshot. Just in case something should go horribly wrong. Takes me an extra hour or so, but well worth it.
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Checking things again this weekend after booting up and backing up. Those Snapshots take sooo long to check. Will post how it ends up.
To me, this is another reason to not use Time Machine. There are other ways to back up that don’t add a bunch of stuff to your boot drive.
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Snapshots don’t “add a bunch of stuff” to the drive. They are, as the name implies, a frozen snapshot of the volume’s contents at a specific point in time. Their creation and destruction is very efficient and very little space is consumed, beyond that of the actual files. And files that have not changed from one snapshot to the next do not consume any additional storage.
Having a low-overhead mechanism to quickly restore files from the last 24 hours without external storage devices is a good thing, not a bad thing. Even if it does mean that Disk First Aid needs to verify 25 copies of the directory structures.
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I always get the POD when doing Disk Utility at the Container level. You just have to wait for it to finish. I think that’s normal.
It still seems cumbersome compared to using ChronoSync, etc. I have no need for what Time Machine does, and I prefer to not have it active on any system I use.
As I recently found out, a key advantage of Time Machine is the ability to set up a new Mac, using Migration Assistant, from a Time Machine backup of a Mac that has suddenly died.
In my case the replacement Mac had smaller storage than the dead Mac so I had to select the data to be copied to that drive. I was then able to manually copy the large Photos Library to an external drive and link the Photos app to it.
Agreed with you @Shamino.
Snapshots aren’t cumbersome or complex IMO. They’re different than what many were used to. The whole on-disk structure that macOS has transitioned to (which includes taking advantage of APFS capabilities) sometimes requires that we learn new ways of doing things that seem harder at first but ultimately are more reliable than what we had before.
Take Time Machine for example. Yes, at one time it was a hot mess. Unreliable. Brittle. Failed when you needed it. Today with the APFS system disks, APFS local snapshots, APFS backup drives, and macOS running from a snapshot, Time Machine is way more robust and reliable than it was pre Big Sur.
- APFS backup storage is much more reliable than HFS+ ever was (yes, even if you use a HDD instead of an SSD for storage).
- Backing up from point-in-time local snapshots eliminates a whole category of file and system consistency issues.
- Not backing up the core operating system (due to running on read-only snapshots) saves disk space and time.
- The use of Migration Assistant to recover from Time Machine backups is much more usable and reliable than it’s ever been.
Give the new Time Machine stuff a try. Set it for daily instead of hourly backups if you’re concerned about having 24 snapshots around on your local disk (or use something like TimeMachineEditor to automate manual Time Machine backups on your own schedule). It isn’t “your grandfather’s Time Machine” any more.
That’s not to say that CCC clones or Chronosync aren’t useful. But Time Machine might cover more day-to-day needs than you think.
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In a situation like migrating to a newer, smaller internal, TM could be useful, but it isn’t relevant for me. I don’t use the Photos app on any Macs. I have a lot of images, but for 20+ years, I have kept them organized by source, and date when applicable: scanned film, flatbed scans, and digital organized by camera or mobile device, plus date. Since I still have working CS6 installs, I can still use Bridge. When those computers die, I’ll have to move on to something like DxO or On1, but Photos won’t ever be involved, and the images will continue to be backed up in a bunch of locations. Same approach with all the stuff I ripped into iTunes.`Most of my email isn’t stored locally, and when it is, it is usually copied from the server rather than moved. I think whether Time Machine is useful depends on what you mainly do with your Mac.
I think you’ve developed a system that works but I also think you would be surprised, should horrible things occur, how many things TimeMachine would recover that you didn’t know how much time it would take to restore. It’s easy and inexpensive to set-up and gives you an added bulwark. Why not do it? Moving to a new machine from a TimeMachine backup is ridiculously easy now, and all those settings you forgot you made will be restored.
Dave
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My Macs that do the heavy lifting are running High Sierra or Mojave (because Adobe CS6), and I have bootable clones of those, plus disk images that can be cloned onto drives. The two ARM Macs get very little use, so I don’t see disaster recovery being a big deal. That could change if I am ever forced to move on from CS6 and get comfortable with alternative photo software, of course.
It also has the ability to use Migration Assistant from a CCC copy.
I have both, a TM-drive permanently connected AND a CCC copy out of home.