Crashed and Macintosh HD is showing snapshot while the memory is greyed

[machenryr]

I'm freaking out a little. I had been a super cautious back up person. I had three or for back up systems on my 7,1Mac Pro and before. But last year since getting the Mac Studio I relaxed a little. I was going to get back to it but hadn't yet. I had a crash this morning getting ready to back up some video. First the mouse Mx Master 3 froze. Probably needed to charge. I rebooted thinking that it had crashed. It came back. I started recharging the mouse but plugged in a USB mouse. The Macintosh HD in Disk Utility is showing a snapshot but the Macintosh HD icon is greyed out. The memory looks right. Probably I'm maxing out which could definitely be a problem - 18.3 GB used 923.93 other volumes and 1.06 TB available.

The question is how do I restore from the snap shot. Oh and I tried to copy data from an external drive to another external drive, both SSD, and it says there's not enough memory. As if I was trying to copy to the internal TB. In the old days I would have used Disk Warrior. Will this fix on it's own? Too late for me to back up? Am I hosed?

Mac Studio M4 Max, 64 GB, Seqouia 15.7.7

 

[machenryr]

I guess everything's fine. The Disk Utility just came up as the greyed out HD, snap shot and data folder underneath. Since I hadn't backed up I freaked. Since my first Mac back in 1985 I've assiduously backed up. The lost data I've had were virtually never. I've had external drives go but not system go, not irretrievably. Getting a back up drive today!

 

[richmlow]

I guess everything's fine. The Disk Utility just came up as the greyed out HD, snap shot and data folder underneath. Since I hadn't backed up I freaked. Since my first Mac back in 1985 I've assiduously backed up. The lost data I've had were virtually never. I've had external drives go but not system go, not irretrievably. Getting a back up drive today!

Yes, I strongly recommend that you resume your backup routine immediately!

Without backups, loss of critical data will be very painful.


richmlow

 

[benholt]

Glad it turned out to be nothing — and yeah, the greyed-out "Macintosh HD" with a snapshot and "Macintosh HD - Data" underneath is just how Disk Utility shows the signed system volume on Apple Silicon. It's read-only and cryptographically sealed, so it always looks inactive. Your actual writable space is the Data volume. Not a sign of damage.

One thing I'd add for the Mac Studio specifically: the easiest no-thinking-required setup is Time Machine to a single high-capacity USB-C drive (I run a 14TB WD Elements shucked into a USB-C enclosure on mine, ~$180 last time I bought one) plus a clone with Carbon Copy Cloner on a schedule. TM gets you the versioned safety net, CCC gets you a bootable-ish recovery point. If you're doing video, add Backblaze on the boot drive so anything you forgot to put on the externals still gets caught. Three legs takes about an hour to set up and then it's invisible.

Re: that mouse-then-system freeze — worth a quick look in Console for IOUSBHostInterface or AppleHIDMouse errors around the crash time. MX Master with a tired battery + Bluetooth-back-to-2.4-GHz handoff has hung my Studio twice in two years.