The remaining technique using snapshots is copying them to another volume. Restoring a whole volume from a snapshot should normally be performed in Recovery. These enable you to maintain snapshots and to copy items from them. But the man page has still been updated, honest!) (Thanks to Pico for pointing out that I hadn’t noticed these commands, which have apparently been there for some years.

man diskutil, updated in January 2021, provides additional detail. The command to delete a snapshot is deleteSnapshot. Will list all snapshots, no matter what created them, on disk13s1. These commands have been added to the apfs verb there, so Deletion is irreversible, as you’d expect, and only to be undertaken when you’re certain that’s what you want to do.Īccompanying this is support for the listing and deletion of snapshots in the diskutil command tool.

Select a snapshot from the list and you can mount it, show it in the Finder, rename it, and delete it, using the More button and the – tool at the bottom left.

The most recent snapshot has a Partition symbol shown against its Tidemark, a value which isn’t explained in the Help page, unfortunately. Most important among those are the name, date of creation, and cumulative size. This opens a new table view in the lower part of the main view in which the selected volume’s snapshots are listed.Īlthough their order is fixed, with the most recent at the bottom of that table, you can customise the columns shown. To engage its new powers, select a volume and use the Show APFS Snapshots command in its View menu. This new feature is cunningly hidden so that you don’t notice this huge leap forward when you first open the app. After four years in which it had offered frustratingly limited support for the new features of APFS, Disk Utility is now complete: this version has excellent support for snapshots, no matter which app created them. I’m delighted to announce not just a nomination, but an outright winner: Disk Utility 21.0, bundled with Monterey. As it’s getting towards the end of the year, I’ve been on the look out for nominations for the title of the most improved utility of the year.

Mac os disk utility purgeable