Disk Utility CANNOT FIX APFS volumes! Why isn't this fixed?

EnterpriseCloud wrote:

Disk utility cannot fix apfs volumes if they have mounted time machine volumes on them. This would be true for most users. It just says the disk cannot be unmounted and fails. The instructions tell you to reformat the disk. THIS IS DANGEROUS AND WRONG since people will erase their backups and potentially lose data.

Add to this the bug that causes the MacBook to disconnect and dismount drives attached through a dock ... randomly... and you have a recipe for data loss when users try to run Disk Utility to fix their drives.

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you can submit your Apple Feedback Product Feedback - Apple

Apple macOS implements Time Machine local snapshots, which borrow storage on a boot device for secondary backups, when the primary backup device is unavailable. These snapshots can also return allocated storage to the available pool as the storage volume fills.

As for Time Machine not working with a Time Machine partition co-resident on an APFS boot device, log feedback with Apple.

Having primary backup storage co-resident with the same volumes being protected is not something I would generally recommend to folks, given the likelihood of catastrophic data loss with that configuration; data and backup both lost after fire, flood, dunk, theft, drop, etc.

If local external storage (HDD, SSD, etc) or network-attached (NAS) storage (e.g. TrueNAS, Synology, etc) is not an option and for whatever reason, there are hosted backups available from various providers including SpiderOak and BackBlaze.

But again, best log your feedback on this issue directly with Apple, with available details.

I'm not sure why it would be dangerous. It's only a backup. You can make another after erasing it.

Regardless, if you have a disk with problems, nobody would ever consider using that as a sole backup. They'd make a new backup on a new drive before erasing the old.

Add to this the bug that causes the MacBook to disconnect and dismount drives attached through a dock ... randomly... and you have a recipe for data loss when users try to run Disk Utility to fix their drives.

Never seen that one.

First of all, when I get these failures to repair the drive *there is nothing wrong with it*! The reason I am repairing it is to prevent problems from accidental ejection (or that bug which ejects it during sleep while on my dock.) Disks can be corrupted in ways that are easily fixed by Disk Utility and do not need to be replaced.

The write ahead cache will already have completed by the time the Mac goes to sleep. There would not be any corruption.

If your drive controller is making your drive eject itself when the Mac goes to sleep, turn off the option to put hard drives to sleep.

Try un-mounting the TM drive from inside Disk Utility and then run First Aid on the unmounted drive.