Space Issues after Time Machine Restore

[Stevoster]

Hi there,

I'm having an issue with an apparent loss of space on my MacBook Pro (2018) after a full system restore from Time Machine. I'll condense the history (and leave out all the hair pulling and screaming at the monitor, but you can imagine).

1. I tried to update from Mojave to the new OS. This failed miserably, I waited a day but it was stuck.
2. Tried everything I could to get it going again, via tips here, elsewhere and a few calls with Apple Support (very helpful people I have to say).
3. All failed, I had to do a full disk erase and restore system from TM (my backup was about a month old, but that's ok as I backup my documents daily separately).
4. After disk erase I restored from TM, but that seems to have failed (I don't know what happened as it ran overnight, but it was like a totally new MAC apart from some of my docs on my desktop, i.e. no apps came back, I'm not sure what OS it was, never took note of it, but I was panicky).
5. I did another full system restore from teh same TM backup but I never deleted any drives via Disk Utility beforehand (not sure that matters but including it in case).
6. That restore worked, I have all my apps back and system looks and feels fine (oh the relief).
7. BUT my storage is clogged up. Please see screenshot below. I have 500gb ssd and I have 128gb available (note that this is before I transfer across my Documents folder from my backup hard drive, pretty sure that was about 250gb).
8. In my ‘About this Mac’ I have a Macintosh HD drive which maybe looks ok, some docs (60gb), system (100gb - is that too big?) and apps/iOS/mails (60gb), but it also has ‘Other volumes in Container’ of 145gb.
9. I also have an Update ‘drive’ showing ‘other volumes in container of 371gb (basically the sum of all the used space on the HD drive).
10. Also a drive ‘Untitled Data’ which just shows zero available, not other breakdown.
11. When I click ‘Manage’ (within About my Mac) it shows a breakdown which corresponds to the breakdown on the HD drive above, no sign of the Other volumes bit.
Sorry, that was a lot of info, do I need to wipe my drives and start again with the backup from TM? I have nothing in my Caches. Tried rebooting too, no joy.

Thank you if you made it this far! Any help would be really appreciated.

Stephen.

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum.

I have an idea what may have happened, but need a bit of information first. Can you open Disk Utility, click on "View" on the top bar of the resulting window and then "Show all Devices" and take a screenshot of what results to post here? I think you may have created a second Volume in the Container for the SSD, or maybe even a second Container. That screenshot will show if that's the case.

 

[Stevoster]

Hi Jake! Thanks for getting back to me and for the welcome (long time lurker here, have found answers to previous issues over the years without even posting - great forum!).

Here's the screenshot (actually I did three shots showing the content of the three things in the container in case that is useful).

Thank you!
Stephen.

 

[MacInWin]

OK, thanks. Now I have a few more questions. Normally, the APFS file structure involves one Container and two, maybe three, Volumes. The names of two of the Volumes are by default, "Macintosh HD" and "Macintosh HD - Data." The system merges these two Volumes into one logical volume named "Macintosh HD" in Finder. Disk Utility can see the separate volumes. What is curious here is that you have "Macintosh HD" but the data volume is named "Untitled - Data." And the third Volume is named Update, but is essentially empty. And Macintosh HD, which is normally relatively small, is the largest Volume in the Container. For example, my own Macintosh HD is about 14 GB, but yours is 230 GB.

So something has gone wrong in the processes you followed. Unfortunately, fixing it is going to be very difficult, I fear.

Let's start with some exploration. Open Finder, the on the top bar click on Go, then Go to Folder and type in "/" (just the slash, not the quote marks. The results should be four folders: Applications, Library, System and Users, nothing more. Try that and let us know if that is what you have.

 

[Stevoster]

Thanks Jake! Yep, I have those four folders (plus a couple of small PDF files).

Interesting what you say about the HD drive size, I use Disk Inventory X to find big files so I opened up the drive.... My own Users file is huge (131gb). Looking through it, it seems to make sense (it has 40gb for MS Outlook, 30gb of docs, including any recent documents in My Documents folder), movies, downloads, music etc. The the other items on the drive look ok - about 30gb applications, 15gb Library, 10gb System.

BUT - when I run the Data drive through disk inventory x - it looks similar in some ways - I have a user file there of 135gb, with a library of 127gb, other folders are small. This library file has 40gb of Outlook mail and 40gb of Mac Mail and bigger Application Support file (40gb versus 15gb on the HD).

Oh man this is so confusing! Looks like I have really messed things up here. Worth noting that I am not afraid to wipe everything down and start again here with another Time Machine system restore if that is the easiest way to do it (but this time do it right of course haha!).

Hope what I have said above makes sense.

Thanks,
Stephen.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, the confusion is that normally the Users folder is on the Data Volume, not on the Macintosh HD Volume. The Macintosh HD Volume should just have Applications, Library and System, nothing else. I don't think Disk Inventory X understands APFS (could be wrong on that, but seem to have read that somewhere), so it may or may not be reporting correctly. What I am suspecting is that you have duplicates of your own user data on the Macintosh HD Volume, but I will have to think about how to get at it. I don't have Disk Inventory but will go get it an do some exploration.

 

[Stevoster]

Ah that is supremely nice of you - thanks a million!

 

[MacInWin]

Ok, Disk Inventory X seems to work, but finding duplicates (assuming they are there) is painful. I had to go down through the tree to see the path to each file to see where it was. I suppose if you see two files with the same name, but one has a path to /Macintosh HD/.... and the other to /Users/....., and are otherwise the same that would be an indictor that you do have duplicates on the Macintosh HD Volume. PITA to track that, but all you need is to fine ONE, which will be an indicator that there are more. Then maybe use Finder to track to that location by using the Go/Go to Folder to get to that exact place to see if there are more there. Then the challenge is which to delete? But first, see if you can locate duplicates. That's a good place to start.

Of course, one alternative, assuming you have a clean backup is to wipe out the drive, repartition, reformat, reinstall the OS from scratch and then restore from the backup. That's a PITA, too, but if you choose to go that path, we can give you details on how to do it.

 

[Stevoster]

Hi Jake, first off thank you! Blown away by this help, genuinely. I did a bit of searching for duplicates and can see loads, but hard to find a clear reason for them or know which one to remove, like you say above. Total PITA. I think I'm going to go down the nuclear option and wipe the drives then do a full system restore from time machine again. I feel like I must ahve messed up by not clearing the drives when I did the second attempt there and somehow ended up with two sets of the same data. When I wiped it before the first time I restored from TM I was on the phone with the Apple folks (I remember that horrible moment of hitting delete or clear) - if you could give me a steer on how to wipe the drives and prep for the TM restore that would be amazing! I'm back on Mojave by the way, does the OS reinstall happen as part of the TM restore? Thanks, Stephen.

 

[MacInWin]

OK, this article from Apple has all of the directions you should need: Recover all your files on Mac

That is for Mojave, since you are on Mojave and have a Mojave TM backup. Just read it over, then print it off and follow the directions carefully. The directions don't show how to reformat/repartition the drive. To do that you will need to boot into Recovery mode. Unfortunately, from your images you don't seem to have a recovery partition on the drive, but you can give this a try: About macOS Recovery on Intel-based Mac computers

If you can boot to recovery, you can use Disk Utility from there to erase the boot drive, reinstall Mojave and at the first boot, use Migration Assistant to recover everything from the backup. If that works, at the end you will have your system exactly as it was when the backup was made.

If you can't boot recovery, you can try an internet boot, shown on the same article, to get Mojave installed, again deleting everything and reformatting the internal drive from the installer screen.

Finally, if all else fails, there is a way documented in the article to get back to the original versions of MacOS on your Mac, then you can upgrade to Mojave and do the recovery from TM.

So, lots of ways depending on what you can get to.

 

[Stevoster]

You legend, thank you so much Jake. I'm going to wait until the weekend and give this a go (need to do some work on it this week). Great tip to print it all off too by the way!! I'll come back here either way once I get through it all to tell my war stories ;-)

 

[ferrarr]

I think you should make a bootable USB installer for Mojave.

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

You can use a USB flash drive or other secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install the Mac operating system. These steps are primarily for system administrators and other experienced users who are familiar with entering commands in Terminal.

support.apple.com

 

[Stevoster]

Very nifty - thanks Bob! I'll do that, I have just the thumb drive here.

 

[Rod]

Because step one is completely erasing the internal HD I kind of favour ferrarr's suggestion but that's just me. Using an external drive to erase an internal just seems logical. Still there are more than one way to achieve the same goal.

My big question is why did the upgrade to Big Sur fail in the first instance?
Once you get back to Mojave I think we should look at that and then I'd encourage you to make a bootable clone of your restored Mojave setup.

I say this because with the release of macOS Monterey soon, Mojave will be the next macOS to loose Apple support. Perhapes it might be better to upgrade incrementally to say, macOS Catalina. I'm only guessing you tried to upgrade to Big Sur because you don't actually say which OS you tried to upgrade to.

 

[Stevoster]

Hi Rod! I'm not sure why it failed, it got stuck fairly deep into the process (I think). I left it for about 18 hours and no progress. Maybe it was just too big of a jump up to Big Sur from Mojave. Ironically I put off previous updates because I was worried about messing with my system which was working perfectly, but putting them off might well have contributed to this total failure.

Is my TM system backup a bootable clone of my Mojave setup? Hope that's not a ridiculous Q. My TM backup is on an external drive.

 

[MacInWin]

TM is not a clone. You CAN boot from it, but only to the Recovery screen where you can reinstall the OS to the internal drive, etc. But you can't actually RUN the system from TM.

 

[Stevoster]

Hi folks! Blast from the past here but I finally plucked up the courage to wipe and rebuild my system yesterday, using the guidance above (went with the external drive for boot) and I am so relieved and happy to say it worked. Thank you all so much for the advice and the time you took to respond, I hugely appreciate it. Not very savvy with this sort of stuff so it was a bit of a leap into the unknown but you guys steered me through. Best wishes your way! Steve.

 

[Stevoster]

Oh and I'm gonna move slowly to Big Sur, via a couple of steps, and plenty of backups along the way ;-)

 

[IWT]

Well done, and thanks for the feedback.

Ian

 

[Rod]

Thank you for your great reply. I’m sure I can speak for everybody here when I say it’s terrific to get positive feedback.
Just one last hint, as I think was mentioned, the macOS after Big Sur is soon to be released. When that happens Apple tends to remove the previous macOS from the App Store, albeit not permanently.
I would advise, if you have the storage space (about 15GB) to simply download the Big Sur installer. Quit it when it launches and leave it in your application folder till you're ready.