Time machine Macintosh and Macintosh HD - Data

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Level 1

8 points

Time machine Macintosh and Macintosh HD - Data

I've read the posts and still cannot figure this out. I've been using TM with an external drive for many months without any issue. Today when I reinstalled Big Sur, I now have two drives, "Macintosh and Macintosh HD - Data". And when I want to set TM prefs to my external drive it's not available (only with an option to remove), but the drive appears a second time in the list under "available", which I select, and I still get the error message "two of the disks have the same name...." No matter what I remove or select to use I cannot get TM to work. My biggest concern is the potential to lose my last six months of TM backups. Thanks for your responses.

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 13, 2022 11:57 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,962 points

Jan 13, 2022 5:14 PM in response to Bill McGowan

You should have Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data, but you shouldn't see the Data Volume in the finder.

If you see Macintosh HD - Data in the Finder, open Disk Utility and remove the second Data volume.

The primary Data Volume will show a House icon in the info Pane when you select it. It will be mounted to /System/Voumes/Data.

The old Data volume will not have the House icon and will be mounted to /Volumes. Select it and click the Remove Volume button (–).

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Answer 2

DonH49

Level 6

16,704 points

Jan 13, 2022 1:09 PM in response to Bill McGowan

When you decided to reinstall then you should use Disk Utility to delete the previous drove not erase it. If you erase it then you'll end up with duplicates. The + and - buttons are important. Save you data before you start experimenting.

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Answer 3

Bill McGowan Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 19, 2022 5:15 AM in response to Barney-15E

Many thanks for your solution to my issue!

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Time machine Macintosh and Macintosh HD - Data

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