Hard Drive duplicated after Time Machine Restore

[TurboSteve]

Hi Everyone,

I updated my 2012 MacBook Pro to Catalina, but decided shortly after that i wanted to go back to Mojave. I restored from my Time Machine backup and while that failed several times, I was eventually able to restore it to Mojave. An unfortunate side effect of this is that my hard drive appears to be duplicated in the Finder window, and as i have two that are labeled the same, Time Machine fails to back up because it's confused about which one to use. I've included a couple of images of the drives listed in Disk Utility and the differences in them within that program.

Time Machine wants me to rename one of them, but i'm not sure there should be two to begin with, and i'm not sure how to really proceed.

Thanks,

Steve

 

[MacInWin]

Hi, Steve. Your images show DU, but in Show Only Volumes mode (A View option). If you use "Show all Devices" you will see the hardware, then indented will be Containers and then Volumes in the Containers. Using that view should help some in sorting out what happened.

Catalina now separates the system Volume from the Data Volume for security, then merges them on the Desktop and Finder as one item, with everything showing as before. But technically, if you had looked at DU, you would have seen that there was a Volume labelled, in your system, as Steve SSD and another as Steve SSD - Data. When you restored Mojave TM struggled to understand the new arrangement because the backup of Mojave was made when you only had one Volume in the Container.

Frankly, at this point it may be best to reinstall Mojave from scratch, reformat the drive to get rid of all containers and volumes and then use MA to bring back your TM backup. Ugly, but it will guarantee it is all back like you expect.

 

[Rod]

It is possible that the two drives we see displayed are actually the Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data volumes not duplication at all but since Steve has renamed the Macintosh HD they may not display as such. Either way despite what you say Jake about being "messy" it might just be the simplest way to ensure everything is as it should be.

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, the dilemma is that given how much Catalina changes the drive layout, TM from Mojave doesn't know what to do. And TM from Catalina won't restore a Mojave system, either, if it works like every other version of TM. So once you have gone Catalina, going back is likely to be nuke'n'pave, then restore.

 

[TurboSteve]

Now that y'all pointed that out, i think i have seen somewhere where one of them is the data file. Here is a photo with the menu opened up.


If i do have to reinstall Mojave, is it possible to get Time Machine to back the computer up at present? Then i would need to figure out how to create a boot disk i think.

 

[Rod]

That screen shots looks exactly as it should to me. Are you having any functional problems? If not I would be inclined to leave it as it is. The smaller of the two volumes will be your operating system and the other your user data.
I do encourage you to create a bootable USB installer for Mojave but you will need to download the Mojave installer again from the App Store unless you saved it.
Yes you can use Time Machine but as for using it to restore files I have not yet tried that with Catalina. Personally I also have a bootable clone and prefer that to TM.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums

 

[ferrarr]

In the images in your first post, they show as the same size 499GB, but both show different amounts for used, and available, that seems strange? Since you see both drives listed separately in Finder, can you do a "Get Info" on them? Do they show as different sizes?

As for your Time Machine backup, you said it wasn't working properly, what is it doing? What did you add, since you did the last Time Machine backup? Can you just copy those files over manually?

 

[TurboSteve]

Functionally it seems to be working just fine, aside from Time Machine not working. I rather prefer to back the computer up, if possible, as i have personal and work material on it. Here is a shot of the get info on both drives:



If Mojave normally runs on a single drive and doesn't split it up like Catalina, is it possible that the drive with all of the space taken up has everything the OS needs and that what's on the second drive is just a copy of certain parts of it? If i can get away with deleting that drive, then Time Machine would conceivably function normally again. Here is the current problem Time Machine gives me:



I'm not against reinstalling Mojave, but it's been several days since this happened and i would be afraid of losing some stuff if I wasn't able to back up the content on the computer.

 

[TurboSteve]

If it doesn't hurt anything to simply rename the data drive, then i could do that and Time Machine would be happy.

 

[ferrarr]

What about if you restart the computer, and hold Option down? This will bring up the Boot options screen, and it should list all the bootable devices connected to your Mac. If you see more than one recovery partition, I think it will list both Mojave and Catalina, then we may be able to tell which is which?

Do you only have a 500GB drive on your MBP, or is it a 1TB?

 

[TurboSteve]

It's just a 500GB.

 

[pine man]

May be a long shot but carrying on from what Bob said earlier, if you 'Get info' from both drives you may well find that, what might be the Data drive, will contain the word Data in 'Get info' half way down under Name & Extension:

 

[TurboSteve]

It doesn't give any info other than the names. That's why i cut off the screen shot.

 

[MacInWin]

The fact that two drives have the same name means the restore didn't work properly. I would bet that you named your boot drive "Steve SSD" when you installed Catalina and then Catalina created two, one named "Steve SSD" and the other "Steve SSD - Data." But then when you rolled back to Mojave, you restored what had been "Steve SSD" (Mojave version) and that probably went to the "Steve SSD - Data" drive. So now you have two named the same and TM gets lost. The key was your statement:

restored from my Time Machine backup and while that failed several times, I was eventually able to restore it to Mojave.

The problem TM had in the failures was, I would guess, it was trying to restore "Steve SSD" (the Mojave one) but there was already a volume named "Steve SSD" (the Catalina one). At this point TM now cannot back up Steve SSD because there are two of them, as it is reporting. That is actually a good thing because the most current TM is still valid and not mucked up by the mess on the drive.

So, as I said in Post #2:

Frankly, at this point it may be best to reinstall Mojave from scratch, reformat the drive to get rid of all containers and volumes and then use MA to bring back your TM backup. Ugly, but it will guarantee it is all back like you expect.

If the current TM backup is good, that approach will solve the "which Steve SSD is the right one" issue and recover all your drive space into one Container/Volume again.

I don't think what Pine Man suggests will work because you have rolled back to Mojave and have overwritten the Data drive with the duplicated Steve SSD, but it doesn't cost anything to check. Just don't be surprised if there is no longer any reference to Data anywhere.

Good luck with it!

EDIT for clarity

 

[MacInWin]

It doesn't give any info other than the names. That's why i cut off the screen shot.

Pine Man wasn't referring to Disk Utility, but to right click on each drive, then select Get Info and look for what is shown. If you have a single button mouse, it's Ctrl+click

 

[pine man]

Another long shot!

If you obtain 'Get info' from the two volumes using Disk Utility you get different info and doing it that way you may see that HD is not writable wheras HD Data is writaeable.

 

[MacInWin]

Pine Man, I tried that with a bootable USB stick and under Mojave both are read/write for me. Given that Steve is back to Mojave, that distinction seems to be lost.

EDIT: The USB stick has Catalina installed, so it does have both volumes. In Catalina, one is read only, but under Mojave both are read/write.

 

[TurboSteve]

I think the TM backup is good, it's just a week or so old and i think there will be a good bit missing if i use that one.

I didn't know that Catalina split the drive like that, and i guess i assumed that restoring it from the TM backup would basically replace and reformat the drive.

 

[pine man]

I'll crack open a bottle and give it some more thought.;D

 

[MacInWin]

I think the TM backup is good, it's just a week or so old and i think there will be a good bit missing if i use that one.

I didn't know that Catalina split the drive like that, and i guess i assumed that restoring it from the TM backup would basically replace and reformat the drive.

Well, unless you have done a lot of work on the since the backup, about all that should change is email, and if you restore, then connect again to your email server, it should download what is missing. It's your call. One thing you can try is see if you can rename one of the Steve SSD drives to be able to distinguish them, then go to each in Finder to see what is there. If you can determine which has your current system (Mojave and your data), you can do a TM backup of that drive, or even try just removing the other Steve SSD Volume. At this point you basically have little to lose giving that a try.