Lots of Disk Utility snapshots left over from a, now resolved, Big Sur update struggle

I only run First Aid occasionally. My recent First Aid runs were inspired by trouble installing Big Sur updates; I was getting crashes when the update executed its restart. In an attempt to resolve my update issue, I ran First Aid and re-attempted updating. That approach did not work, but did create snapshots; apparently several each attempt.

Eventually, I resolved my update issue by restarting in safe mode, and taking up the update process from safe mode.

After successfully updating, I again ran First Aid, and I still see the ~20something snapshots.

No. It's not totally fine last I checked.

The last First Aid I ran still showed the many snapshots, which is "not fine" only in the sense that running First Aid is very slow.

As you say, I do not have to run First Aid frequently, so "not fine" is "not horrible."

Is the expected behavior that MacOS will automagically clean up the old snapshots? Eventually?

Thank you for that. And with that I declared the issue solved.

(Maybe I should have waited to see all the snapshots go away, but it makes sense to me to expect that they will. I'll feed back if they remain....)

Thanks again.

Justin

The number of snapshots appears to be going down automagically. Yay.

First Aid reports 15 snapshots today. Which is down from over 20 previously.

Question: Are these snapshots Time Machine snapshots? Or are they "more general" disk/file system maintenance care and feeding?

Jack,

Your initial advice remains the right answer. Rephrasing... "Don't worry about the snapshots."

Just to round out the thread, I've pasted the output of a First Aid run this morning below. As can be seen, there are (again) 20 snapshots. But... they all appear to have been created yesterday and today, so apparently the standard good behavior.

FWIW, it was only snapshot "3" that took a lot of time (~20 minutes) to run.

Thanks again,

Justin

================

Running First Aid on “Macintosh HD - Data” (disk2s1)

Verifying the startup volume will cause this computer to stop responding.

Verifying file system.

Volume could not be unmounted.

Using live mode.

Performing fsck_apfs -n -l -x /dev/rdisk2s1

Checking the container superblock.

Checking the fusion superblock.

Checking the EFI jumpstart record.

Checking the space manager.

Checking the space manager free queue trees.

Checking the object map.

Checking the Fusion data structures.

Checking volume.

Checking the APFS volume superblock.

Checking the object map.

Checking the snapshot metadata tree.

Checking the snapshot metadata.

Checking snapshot 1 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-075908.local)

Checking snapshot 2 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-085915.local)

Checking snapshot 3 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-095920.local)

Checking snapshot 4 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-120028.local)

Checking snapshot 5 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-150131.local)

Checking snapshot 6 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-160140.local)

Checking snapshot 7 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-170220.local)

Checking snapshot 8 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-180235.local)

Checking snapshot 9 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-200303.local)

Checking snapshot 10 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-210342.local)

Checking snapshot 11 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-220402.local)

Checking snapshot 12 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-05-230353.local)

Checking snapshot 13 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-000454.local)

Checking snapshot 14 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-010558.local)

Checking snapshot 15 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-020604.local)

Checking snapshot 16 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-030651.local)

Checking snapshot 17 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-040651.local)

Checking snapshot 18 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-050659.local)

Checking snapshot 19 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-060652.local)

Checking snapshot 20 of 20 (com.apple.TimeMachine.2021-05-06-070724.local)

Checking the extent ref tree.

Checking the fsroot tree.

Verifying allocated space.

The volume /dev/rdisk2s1 appears to be OK.

File system check exit code is 0.

Restoring the original state found as mounted.

Operation successful.