When I view the storage on my main drive using "About this Mac" I appear to be losing over 500GB of space to "Other Volumes in Container".
I know that there should be a hidden VM volume and a hidden recover volume, but these should be tiny.
Has anyone else seen this? I cannot find a command which will list what these hidden volumes are.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Open Disk Utility and look at the drive, there.
It won't show the VM, PreBoot, or Recovery, but if there is another volume, it should show up.
You should see Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data.
If there is another, that might be the source.
In Terminal, enter this command and then post the results.
diskutil list
There will be a section that lists your Macintosh HD and - Data along with the others. You only need to copy and paste that section. Or, just look at it to determine the name of that other Volume.
Here are the results for diskutil list:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk2 121.0 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *3.0 TB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk2 3.0 TB disk1s2
/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +3.1 TB disk2
Physical Stores disk0s2, disk1s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 1.1 TB disk2s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 65.4 MB disk2s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 528.1 MB disk2s3
4: APFS Volume VM 0 B disk2s4
5: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.0 GB disk2s5
I rebooted into recovery mode and ran First Aid in Disk Utility. On reboot, I checked and found that the "other volumes" size has gone done a bit to about 450GB. I will run first aid a few more times.
I was wondering if one of the volumes had been set with a minimum reserved size, but I cannot find where to locate this information.
I successfully created a new test volume and then deleted it but didn't seem to make any difference.
I don't remember seeing that, but it was likely always there and I forgot about it.
I don't see anything in either Disk Utility or diskutil that provides that information. Probably requires changes to diskutil in order to display that info.
I checked in Disk Utility and this is what I found:
I have one volume which is 545.37 GB in size, but I cannot work out what it is
So, from that, there isn't some other Volume using 500GB.
Everything looks normal except the storage display in About this Mac, but that has never been accurate for as long as it has existed.
You can set a quota (maximum) on an APFS Volume, but not a minimum.
I found this when I created a test volume:
Disk Space - Other Volumes in Container