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What Is Causing This Listing Of Multiple Drives In Disk Utilities?

I have multiple HD listed on my iMac disk utility and can’t figure out why? Any suggestions?? It looks like they are separate drives but I don’t have any external drives listed like this. Could they be separate partitions? They showed up without, to my knowledge, me doing anything??

Any help is appreciaated.

e.g. Showing in Disk Utilities

Macintosh 3 volumes
Macintosh 3 snapshot
Macintosh HD – Data
Macintosh HD2

I am trying to figure out why these additional drive/particians are showing up. I also would like to know what if anything I should do?
—–
Mike

Comments: 2 Responses to “What Is Causing This Listing Of Multiple Drives In Disk Utilities?”

    2 years ago

    That's perfectly normal. It is exactly what you should see on any Mac running Ventura.

    One is the System Volume. It is the read-only volume that contains macOS. Apple moved the system to this read-only volume some years ago as a great security feature. The second volume is just a snapshot of the system volume. A snapshot is like a clone of that volume, but it takes up no additional space unless a system update is in progress. Some very clever things going on there, but hard to explain.

    The third volume contains all of your stuff. Your data and files and everything.

    This is all put together in the Finder so you only see one Macintosh HD and it looks like before. You don't have to think of it as three volumes at all. That's all behind-the-scenes.

    Robert
    2 years ago

    If you click on all the down chevon symbols the extra entries will disappear and you only see the right chevon symbol with the internal hard drive showing.

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