Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD Data?

Thanks for the reply, they both show up in finder, I have attached images, and they have the exact same folders.

I am very confused by this whole thing, it seems there is an issue with the installation and/or restoration of data from time machine.

The Finder shows it as one drive. Ignore the other's existence.

What did you try to restore from? Was it a pre-Catalina backup or a Catalina backup?

You can't restore a pre-Catalina OS drive to a Catalina file system. It will fail.

I restored data after installing the OS after formatting the drive.

They clearly show up to me as separate drives, am I reading the picture wrong?\

I would just ignore the second drive. You can't write to it anyway.

It isn't correct, but I doubt it would cause any problems.

What's even stranger is that Time Machine will not back-up on my new MBP 16" if both drives are mounted. I have to unmount the data drive. That seems like it would miss important data to back-up? I don't know, since Catalina everything seems to just have gotten more complicated with Macs. What happens to "it just works" mantra that we used to live by. I feel like this is becoming more like an old Windoze machine which was a big reason for changing to Macs several years ago. What gives?

I agree, Barry.

I used every Microsoft OS going back to the early DOS days. When Win-10 arrived with all it's 'issues' I opted to change to an iMac.

Loved it until . . . CATALINA

Little issues have started reminding me of MS systems - And I don't like the feeling!

Check your Disk Utility app. There might be a “Mac HD/Macintosh HD” disk drive that is unnecessary and only taking up a few KB/MB of storage. That’s what happened to me, there was a third unnecessary drive. Also the program you’re using to check your drives with the photo attached isn’t Disk Utility?

Interesting. Does one of the "Data Drives" have nothing in it and the other showing there is? At the Apple store we checked both of the Data volumes. 1 had material and the other was empty. So we just deleted the empty one and now Time Machine works well and haven't noticed any loss of data or any other malfunctions on the computer. BTW, the new 16" rocks.

I have the same problem. I wish I would've researched all those issues regarding Catalina before I upgraded. After a complicated upgrade, I was just happy that it seemed stable. Now I just noticed Time Machine couldn't back up and I came looking for info and see this...three drives instead of one, back-ups rendered useless... I think my Mac days are counted. The mighty Mac is not what it used to be.

I recommend you take your device to an Apple store, if you want to keep your data. Otherwise if you have Mojave are you able to erase your drives properly with the manuals from the Apple website and reinstall MacOS Mojave? If you want to try this way I hope this works.

Before I risk losing any data, I need to understand whether there is any risk to leaving the situation where it is now. As I said in prior post, my computer works fine. Every time I muck around with rebooting and reinstalling, it takes enormous amounts of time, and something frequently will not work right until I finally figure out the problem, but sometimes with a substantial loss of time.

So, again, my question is: what's the risk of leaving well enough alone?

I "Upgraded" to Catalina. When I found out that most of my Apps were not compatible, I tried to revert back to Mojave via Time Machine. What a nightmare. I kept getting the message that it failed. I went into Disk Utilities and tried to erase the complete hard drive with the Data volume as I thought that would be causing the problem (it would only allow me to reformat as an APFS format not a Mac OS Journaled format) , but it would not delete the Data Volume.

I ended up erasing the Data volume several times and eventually I was able to reload my Mojave back-up, but I still have the Data volume showing on my desktop which is duplicate of the hard drive.

So obviously the drive is separate with the system files, then the data files.

Whats the process for installing a new SSD now based on this new way of separating the files for Catalina?

I’m concerned that if I don’t do this properly, I’ll lose all my data.

The problem is, I was following the steps to restore the SSD by using the SATA to USB 3.0 cable, so I’m not too sure if it will partition my data. I selected restore on my SSD from MacOS HD, not MacOS HD data. Slightly concerned now 😂