Hello!
Could somebody please what is eating hard disk space? I am a new user of Mac iOS (coming from Windows background), but from the given snapshots/attached, it looks like there is a space in my hard drive, but probably it is not being used due to unmount thing.
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15
Before you do anything make sure to have a good backup in case something goes wrong.
I don't know how you did it but you should not be able to have two APFS volumes with the exact same name. If you have all your data within your current user folder, then try deleting the extra "Macintosh HD - Data" volume.
https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/add-erase-or-delete-apfs-volumes-dskua9e6a110/mac
You should always have frequent and regular backups.
You can try mounting it with a different name in order to see what it contains.
I don't know if you will regain the missing space because I don't know how you ended up with two seemingly identically named APFS volumes within the same Container which I would not think is even possible to do. If the ghosted out volume contains a copy lots of data, then it should free up the space. I don't know if this is just a mirror image of the main "Macintosh HD - Data" volume or not as I have seen Disk Utility display some weird things recently.
If you have a good backup, then there should be very little risk to attempting to delete this volume. Worst case you will need to perform a clean install of macOS by first erasing the entire physical SSD before installing macOS and migrating from a backup (Intel Only). If you have an M1 Mac, then you may need to perform a firmware "Restore" which requires another Mac capable of running macOS 10.15+, although you try to follow Apple's instructions to delete all the volumes (and Container?) although Apple's instructions can be sometimes be insufficient and/or misleading (may depend on the Apple article you use as a guide). In your case the firmware Restore would be best since I have never tried to delete all the volumes or the Container on an M1 Mac.
Thank you for your response. I see there are two volumes with the same name "Macintosh HD - Data". But one of them is "unmounted".
1: What if I "mount" it with a different name?
2: Will deleting the "extra" "Macintosh HD - Data" will release the space occupied? In this case approx 187 GB?
Your insights are highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Komi.
I didn't make any progress on this issue yet. However, I'm still interested to fix this problem.
Some more info:
Having said that, I expect someone on this Apple forum, to guide me step-by-step so that I can add some harddisk space by recovering 187 GB of "Other Volumes in Container"
Thank you.
Komi.
Try deleting the extra "Data" volume using the instructions in the Apple article I linked in an earlier post. While booted normally Disk Utility will only allow you to delete the volume that is not currently associated with your home user folder. It is possible you may first need to unmount the extra "Data" volume first before Disk Utility will allow you to delete the extra APFS "Data" volume. See the Apple article for instructions.
In theory deleting the extra APFS "Data" volume should be enough to resolve your issues.
FYI, macOS tends to hide things from their users so managing drives/partitions/volumes is a bit more difficult & confusing than it is with Windows. By trying to make things "simpler" for most users, Apple has actually made it very difficult to do other things. Older versions of Disk Utility were a bit more like managing drives under Windows (sort of), but today Disk Utility is a watered down version of itself which doesn't work very well anyway.
Other Volumes in Container taking 187 GB
