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sebalvarez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 15, 2022
153
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I'm facing having to backup, create a USB Ventura installer (can't install Sonoma yet because of various VST3 plugins that don't support it yet), wipe the internal storage and spend two weeks getting everything back to normal. So I thought I would ask here before getting started on all that, because it's something that I will have to do anyway, but months from now when every single piece of software I have has been approved for compatibility with Sonoma. I just don't want to do it twice.

So here's how this started. Yesterday I opened Disk Utility as I did many times before, and tried to delete those damn AFPS snapshots that only server to take up space and many times give you and other software erroneous information about the available disk space. Some people have posted online a Terminal command to do that, or to write a self enlarging file that will cause macOS to delete them, but to me it's easier to just go there and delete them. I have done that many times without incident. Almost each night when I'm done for the day, I plug in my Time Machine drive and let it work all night long.

But this time, when I tried to delete these snapshots, DiskUtil froze. I waited for like an hour, nothing. So I killed it, restarted the machine, and tried again. Same thing happened. So I killed it and rebooted, and this time I ran a first aid on all the internal containers and volumes. They came up with errors, and when I got to the lowest level, meaning the Macintosh HD - Data, and ran the first aid on it, it froze. I waited and waited, all night long actually, and this morning it was still the same. Disk Util was frozen, but not the rest of the system, so I was able to shut down the machine without forcing it from the power button.

Next, I booted into Recovery (and who the hell at Apple thought that pressing the power button for like 20 seconds on a Mac Studio was a good idea as opposed to the good ol' Cmd+R after the chime). I ran Disk Util and First Aid from Recovery and took some photos:


IMG_7472 Large.jpeg



IMG_7473 Large.jpeg



IMG_7474 Large.jpeg


This is first aid ran at the top level. I think I ran it at the second level but forgot to take photos.

IMG_7477 Large.jpeg


As you can see in the first three, the internal storage is a complete mess. The fourth photo passes, but I'm not sure if I can rely on that. Especially because of this:

When I rebooted into macOS, I encounter a whole new thing. Finder windows had completely lost the toolbar. Other than the name of the current folder, there's nothing there. No back/forward, search, none of the custom toolbar icons I had put in there when I first installed Ventura from scratch about a year ago.

So for those here who know way more than I do, do you see the logs from first aid as corruption that cannot be fixed, and I have to wipe and install Ventura from scratch, or is it possible to fix this?
 
How about this. Wipe fully your SSD. Clean install latest Sonoma. Then can’t you run a Parallel window of Ventura, for example like this. Surely there is a virtualization or partition solution to your dilemma, even on Apple Silicon

No matter what, I would never trust the file system on your current install. I wouldn’t even wait for an answer or a “fix.”
 
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How about this. Wipe fully your SSD. Clean install latest Sonoma. Then can’t you run a Parallel window of Ventura, for example like this. Surely there is a virtualization or partition solution to your dilemma, even on Apple Silicon
I'm not going to buy Parallels for this, or even install two versions of macOS. Like i mentioned, I can't install Sonoma for now. It needs to be Ventura until every piece of software that I use is compatible.

Does anybody know how bad this is? It might seem bad, but maybe it's just one of those snapshots that got corrupted and when it goes away, the errors go away with it.
 
The error basically means APFS has a document id for the files that (were) in the snapshot but the inode is missing because the data was deleted. That’s because when you killed diskutil it had probably already removed the files, but failed to prune all the snapshot metadata from the volume.

You have to run the fsck manually from recovery to fix the error. For whatever reason diskutil doesn’t actually do it “for real.” There have been threads on here with the instructions just search for fsck_apfs
 
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I realize this doesn't help you at the moment, but...
A suggestion for the future:
STOP using time machine for your backups.

START using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.
With CCC you can "turn off" snapshots completely, and never be bothered by them again -- not one.

And with a "cloned" backup, everything will be "right there in front of you", reachable in the finder.
 
Don’t follow the above advice to completely stop using Time Machine.
Snapshots and Time Machine are a completely suitable backup system for most people, but it can’t hurt to have more than one backup system in place, so making an additional backup with CCC or SuperDuper is not a bad idea.
 
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