Weird disk issue after Time Machine restore

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Hi all,

I restored my computer using Time Machine, and then after that my backups stopped working because it said two disks had the same name. I renamed one, but I'm not sure what's going on.

Screen Shot 2019-12-06 at 4.56.46 PM.png

Is it okay to leave things as they are? Everything seems to be working, and Time Machine is backing up as expected, too.
 
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I'm not sure what you did here. It looks like you have 2 partitions on your SSD. Was that your intent? What version of macOS are you on? Can you post a screen cap of what Disk Utility is showing?
 

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Welcome to our forums.

It would help if you gave us more information.

Are you running Catalina? If so, two partitions (containers) named Macintosh HD is normal for Catalina. One container is read only and has the system files, the other is your user information which you have read, write access to.
 
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Welcome to our forums.

It would help if you gave us more information.

Are you running Catalina? If so, two partitions (containers) named Macintosh HD is normal for Catalina. One container is read only and has the system files, the other is your user information which you have read, write access to.

Yes, I'm running Catalina. So that means everything's okay? I just wasn't sure why there were two Macintosh HDs. I didn't remember seeing that before, and after the restore I was having problems with Time Machine until I renamed one of them. I just didn't want to have issues in the future if I had to do another restore from Time Machine. Thank you, chscag and Lifeisabeach!
 
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Yes, I'm running Catalina. So that means everything's okay? I just wasn't sure why there were two Macintosh HDs. I didn't remember seeing that before, and after the restore I was having problems with Time Machine until I renamed one of them. I just didn't want to have issues in the future if I had to do another restore from Time Machine. Thank you, chscag and Lifeisabeach!

Yes, there are 2 "Macintosh HDs" in Catalina, but the way they are named for you is not correct. See my screen cap from Disk Utility. The naming may have no practical effect to be honest. I'm more interested in making sure you don't have a second partition. What you should have are 2 logical volumes on one partition, if that's the correct terminology I'm using.

screenshot_04.jpg
 
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Yes, there are 2 "Macintosh HDs" in Catalina, but the way they are named for you is not correct. See my screen cap from Disk Utility. The naming may have no practical effect to be honest. I'm more interested in making sure you don't have a second partition. What you should have are 2 logical volumes on one partition, if that's the correct terminology I'm using.

Hmmm, mine doesn't look like that.

Screen Shot 2019-12-07 at 2.02.10 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-12-07 at 2.02.24 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-12-07 at 2.02.41 PM.png
 
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Click on the "View" box in the upper left corner of Disk Utility and select the "Show All Devices" view, then post a screenshot of what that says. Your view is hiding the hardware information that we need to determine what is going on.
 
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OK, Thanks. You seem to have a mess. To expand on what LIAB said, Catalina changes how the OS uses the drive. It creates two Volumes in the Container that is set up. One Volume is Macintosh HD, and there is where the system is located. The drive is set up so that you cannot write to it, only read. That setup is to protect the system from any attempts to infiltrate it with malware. The second Volume is named Macintosh HD - Data, and is where your data is stored and where you have read/write authority. But to keep it easy for users, Apple pulls some trickery and the two drives are merged in Finder as one, Macintosh HD, just as before. Only in DU will you see the two. When you did your restore from TM was it the TM from Catalina or the older version of macOS? The most recent version of TM knows about the change in Volume structure, so it should NOT have created a second volume with the same name. However, the older version doesn't know about the change, so it makes a new volume and puts the data there. We don't know which one you renamed, so we don't know how to undo the mess. If I had to guess, I would say that you got lucky and renamed the newly created bogus drive with the "2." I say that because you should not be able to change the Catalina Macintosh HD. What is on Macintosh HD 2? Anything you need or want? Can you copy that from M HD 2 to your home folders, which will move it to Macintosh HD - Data? Once you do that, you can get rid of the Macintosh HD 2 volume to free up the space it is taking. It's only about 11 GB, but it doesn't need to be there.
 
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It should have been a Catalina to Catalina restore. I have to use Parallels for work, and it became corrupt, so I restored the previous day's backup. But I had already upgraded to Catalina before that backup. I think HD -2 is unneeded. I tried unmounting it first to correct the duplicate name issue, so it's unmounted. I guess that means I'm not using it? It's probably a copy of HD, which must be the newer one since it is the larger of the two? Sorry for the silly question, but how do I see what's inside HD and HD -2?

- - - Updated - - -

When I do "About this Mac," it shows this:

Screen Shot 2019-12-07 at 2.35.48 PM.png
 
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Well, you can mount HD 2 and use Finder It should see HD 2 because it only merged HD and HD - Data. And if you have it unmounted and are running well, then it's most likely safe to use DU to delete it. Unlike partitions, deleting a Volume is easy and relatively safe.

Seeing what is in the Macintosh HD Volume isn't really possible because of the merge with the Data volume. But you may not need to do that, if you can see what is in HD 2 and verify that you don't need it.
 
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You updated while I was typing. Now that I see that screenshot, I'm not so sure of what has happened. It now looks like you renamed the boot volume to HD 2. And that Catalina is merging HD 2 and HD Data into the boot drive. Ugly.

Can I recommend you reinstall Catalina, wiping the drive and starting over? If you make a backup, and it works, then after doing the clean install you can restore from the backup and should end up with just the two Volumes Apple is expecting to see there.
 
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Hmm, I have one hint. When I use DU to look at my drive, I have just the two Volumes. The Macintosh HD volume has a little Finder icon on the lower right corner, and the Data volume has a little house. In your pictures I see that you have the Finder on "2" and the house on Data and nothing on the drive named "Macintosh HD." I'm thinking that the two with icons are the keepers, and that the one with no icon an be eliminated. What I would recommend is to boot into Recovery, use DU there to eliminate "Macintosh HD" and then rename "2" to just "Macintosh HD" and reboot. That should be able to get things back to where they should be.
 
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Hmm, I have one hint. When I use DU to look at my drive, I have just the two Volumes. The Macintosh HD volume has a little Finder icon on the lower right corner, and the Data volume has a little house. In your pictures I see that you have the Finder on "2" and the house on Data and nothing on the drive named "Macintosh HD." I'm thinking that the two with icons are the keepers, and that the one with no icon an be eliminated. What I would recommend is to boot into Recovery, use DU there to eliminate "Macintosh HD" and then rename "2" to just "Macintosh HD" and reboot. That should be able to get things back to where they should be.

I'm running a backup now, and I'll try that and get back to you after the backup completes. I probably told the Time Machine to restore to the wrong place when I did the restore.
 
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What I would recommend is a clean reinstall, then use Migration Assistant to pull in your data when it is first offered on the initial boot up from the clean install. Don't restore, let MA do the work for you. That way you should end up with your account and data looking exactly as it does now.

To do a clean install, you can either use DiskmakerX to build a bootable thumb drive with Catalina on it, or you can use the Recovery process. About macOS Recovery - Apple Support
 
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What I would recommend is a clean reinstall, then use Migration Assistant to pull in your data when it is first offered on the initial boot up from the clean install. Don't restore, let MA do the work for you. That way you should end up with your account and data looking exactly as it does now.

To do a clean install, you can either use DiskmakerX to build a bootable thumb drive with Catalina on it, or you can use the Recovery process. About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

I did the other method before I saw this. I deleted "Macintosh HD" and then renamed "2" to just "Macintosh HD" and rebooted. Now everything looks perfectly normal and Time Machine isn't giving me any errors. Thank you for the help!

Screen Shot 2019-12-07 at 4.03.31 PM.png
 
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Glad that worked. It is a bit more risky, but if it worked, great!
 
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I had a similar issue but a restore wasn't involved.

My machine is running Catalina and time machine was backing up to two drives.

All was going well until out of the blue time machine reported that the operation had failed and I got the message about two drives (but the message was only appearing for one of the back up drives). I reformatted the drive, but on the first backup got the message again.

I've stopped using the drive and am now just backing up to one drive, but am wondering what's gone wrong?

Sent from my Pixel 4 using Mac-Forums mobile app
 
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I had a similar issue but a restore wasn't involved.

My machine is running Catalina and time machine was backing up to two drives.

All was going well until out of the blue time machine reported that the operation had failed and I got the message about two drives (but the message was only appearing for one of the back up drives). I reformatted the drive, but on the first backup got the message again.

I've stopped using the drive and am now just backing up to one drive, but am wondering what's gone wrong?

Sent from my Pixel 4 using Mac-Forums mobile app

Silly question, but do the two drives have the same name?
 

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