MacBook Air M1 Recovery partition is Monterey?

[iHorseHead]

Hey!
It's not a life or death question, but today I ran out of storage on my MacBook Air. I had 2mb at best available storage, so I made a Time Machine backup and just booted into recovery partition and it started installing Monterey. Why didn't it install Sonoma? or Big Sur? My Mac came with Big Sur. Why was the recovery partition Monterey? Just out of curiosity. I'm on Monterey now and to be honest it's still fine and feels fully usable.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Apple Silicon Macs will have two Recovery environments. One is Recovery (that you press and old the power/Touch ID button for) and the other is Failover Recovery (that you triple-press and then hold the power/TouchID button for.

Recovery is going to contain the recoveryOS that was most recently installed (whether cleanly or via an update). Failover Recovery is going to contain the recoveryOS that was there before you installed your most recent OS (whether cleanly or via an update). So, if you're on macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 and then you update to macOS Sonoma 14.5, your recoveryOS will be based on Sonoma 14.5 and your Failover Recovery version of recoveryOS will be based on 14.4.1.

Similarly, if you are on Monterey and you directly jump to Sonoma 14.5, your recoveryOS will be based on 14.5 and your Failover recoveryOS will be based on Monterey.

Out of the box or coming out of a DFU restore, an Apple Silicon Mac will have no Failover recoveryOS environment.

I'm not sure what Time Machine does these days. My guess is that it stashes a recovery environment for whatever OS it backed up.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

These will also have way more info, if you're curious:

How Recovery works on M1 series Macs

Most users won’t have noticed, but Recovery now works quite differently on M1 series Macs than it did in Big Sur. Here’s a detailed explanation of the changes.

eclecticlight.co

Recovery on Apple silicon Macs has changed again

A new way to enter fallback Recovery can now be triggered during a restart. Here’s a full review of primary and fallback Recovery modes for M1 and M2 Macs.

eclecticlight.co

 

[iHorseHead]

I guess I went into Failover recovery mode then? I held down power button and had the latest version of macOS. I was surprised when it started installing Monterey. I mean I wouldn't be if the system came with Monterey but it came with Big Sur, so I was kind of confused.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I guess I went into Failover recovery mode then? I held down power button and had the latest version of macOS. I was surprised when it started installing Monterey. I mean I wouldn't be if the system came with Monterey but it came with Big Sur, so I was kind of confused.

Was Monterey the OS you had on there before? If so, that'd explain it.

 

[iHorseHead]

Was Monterey the OS you had on there before? If so, that'd explain it.

Nah, before 14.5 Sonoma I was on Ventura.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Hmm...that makes decidedly less sense. What OS was your back-up from?

 

[iHorseHead]

Hmm...that makes decidedly less sense. What OS was your back-up from?

The last one was from sonoma. I’ll try again.
Hmm, now it offers me to reinstall Sonoma. My Mac is a lot faster now.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Yeah, it's odd that you had the option to do Monterey if neither your most recent nor the one before it was Monterey. 1TR and Failover Recovery are kind of odd. What I do to at least make things somewhat simple is I will DFU restore my Mac when going between major releases (you can restore from your Time Machine back-ups if you don't want to set things up from scratch [though I definitely will advocate for doing that from time to time]). Makes things cleaner. While Internet Recovery got messy, especially with bridgeOS being a factor on T2 Intel Macs, restoring did seem a lot simpler from the nuts and bolts perspective.

 

[HDFan]

Are you keeping ~30% of your boot drive storage free?