My Mac (2023 M2 Mac Book Pro, MacOS 15.1, APFS & Filevault volume) is misbehaving, as I’m not able to find files in my Home directory using Spotlight, Alfred or Houdaspot. When I run Disk Utility, it reports a bunch of record and inode errors (error: doc-id tree: record exists for doc-id 191199, file-id 234652166 but no inode references this doc-id) that it can’t fix. Running it a second time I get this error:
Also, when I check my folder permissions, there are a bunch of duplicates for my user.
Years ago, there were a plethora of tools like DiskWarrior and the like, which would quickly and easily resolve these issues. I’ve not kept up with these tools over the years as I’ve not had the need to use them, relying solely on Disk Utility.
What are your thoughts on the best way to resolve these issues with my APFS data partition? I’d hate to have to run a full backup of my user profile, reformat the drive, and restore the data, but that’s what I’m thinking of doing. And speaking of backups, is Time Machine the best way to do a backup & restore?
@TallTrees - sorry you’re having issues. Please tell us which macOS version, what machine, etc. Also - have you recently updated, upgraded or made significant hardware or software changes?
I’m now creating another backup of the Data partition using ChronoSync, and will then run DiskWarrior on that backup to see what it finds and repairs. I can’t run DiskWarrior v5 on my internal SSD as it’s an APFS drive, so I’ve backed up to a MacOS Extended Volume, which I can run DiskWarrior on. If repairs are made, I’ll reformat the Data partition and restore from the repaired backup.
Ok, that’s interesting, let us know how it works out. TidBITS Talk isn’t a bug or repair support site but perhaps [one of] the gentlefolk herabouts will have more helpful ideas than I ;–)
Good luck.
Have you tried starting the Mac from Recovery, and run Disk Utility and First Aid checks from there? I’ve found that trying to run First Aid checks on the startup disk when booted from it to be somewhat unreliable.
I recently noticed that I have some duplicate permission entries, so I will be interested in any solutions to that part of the problem. As far as I know, I have no other symptoms, but Time Machine has failed to complete a backup since my last macOS update. (I’m now running macOS Big Sur 11.7.10 on my MBA M1.)
As much as I hate to say it, I think the full backup, reformat, and restore is the only realistic step. (In the modern world, that will entail reformatting, reinstalling macOS, and then restoring data, or so I expect—I haven’t had to do this in years.) Things like DiskWarrior never made the leap to APFS for a plethora of reasons, and I was often leery of them anyway. Best to start over and hopefully the bad blocks on the drive or whatever will be mapped out.
Time Machine is fine, but if it were me, I’d make at least one other duplicate with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. You never want to bet on a single backup being good.
I’ve since; attempted to make a backup with ChronoSync, and it’s failed due to Container errors. I made 2 backups using Time Machine and ran Disk Utility’s First Aid on one of them, and it found the same exact errors that the Data partition had.
I’ve reinstalled the OS, and then ran First Aid and it continues to find errors.
So I’ve manually backed up each of my User folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc.) to an external drive, and will consider doing the full wipe and reinstall. I don’t know if restoring from Time Machine backup is a good idea as those files are showing errors too:
Checking snapshot 1 of 21 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2024-11-19-132606.local, transaction ID 212198249)
warning: inode (id 238751353): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
warning: snapshot fsroot / file key rolling / doc-id tree corruptions are not repaired; they'll go away once the snapshot is deleted
warning: inode (id 394594170): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
warning: descendants (2537) of dir-stats object (id 255757) is greater than expected (2526)
warning: descendants (43) of dir-stats object (id 2659194) is greater than expected (38)
warning: physical_size (7770112) of dir-stats object (id 2659194) is greater than expected (577536)
error: doc-id tree: record exists for doc-id 3408, file-id 13306170 but no inode references this doc-id
error: doc-id tree: record exists for doc-id 3511, file-id 36863956 but no inode references this doc-id
error: doc-id tree: record exists for doc-id 3517, file-id 37956312 but no inode references this doc-id
I’ve been using Macs since 1984 with my Mac 128K box, and am very familiar with the tedious backup, wipe, reinstall, copy data process and like you, I’ve not had to do it in a very long time. I was really hoping that Apple’s First Aid or a 3rd party tool would help me resolve this. Clean My Mac, DiskWarrior (which I used to love), Drive Genius, etc. but they all appear to have gone bye-bye when it comes to APFS.
For a number of years after APFS was adopted as the default file system Time Machine continued to use HFS formatted drives. Perhaps you can still create a TM back up on an HFS drive, then utilize DiskWarrior thereon?
Yes. The only way to create a TMH (Time Machine on HFS+) volume is to create it on a Mac running an old-enough version of macOS (Catalina or older, I believe) and then upgrade that Mac to the version of macOS you want to use.
Which is awkward, to say the least.
But there’s no real reason to create a TMH volume unless you think you’ll need to read it from some other (older) Mac.
I’ve used Disk Drill Pro and Data Rescue from Prosoft in the past to recover files to an external HD. Good as a last resort perhaps. I would tend to agree with Adam that a recover files, wipe and restore is your best approach.
