Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD Data - Can I delete the HD Data Utility?

D.I. Johnson wrote:

In addition to what @jeffreythefrog has posted…

The newest versions of macOS kind of cheat when it comes to showing your drive information with the Finder. APFS boot drives are not partitioned in the same way they were previously, and the macOS and user files now reside on two separate volumes. "Macintosh HD" is where the critical macOS files and folders live, and "Macintosh HD - Data" is used for all of your user files and data.

When you look at your internal drive in a Finder window it will always appear to be a single volume named simply "Macintosh HD". You will never see "Macintosh HD - Data" as your drives name or location in Finder. The Disk Utility and Terminal apps can show you the differentiated drives, but not Finder. MacOS does this magic behind the scenes and, for better or worse, you won't see that. It's the cause of much confusion for many Mac users.

Seconded. macOS makes it appear that all of your data is stored on a single APFS volume in the Finder; in reality, macOS is stored on the system volume (Macintosh HD), and your data is stored on the data volume (Macintosh HD - Data).

BrookeMO, if you want to resolve the storage issue, you should review the advice in these articles. The second link is not from Apple Support, but it is a helpful user tip written by neuroanatomist to help reduce the space taken up by the "Other" or "System Data" category.

Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how… - Apple Community

In addition to what @jeffreythefrog has posted…

The newest versions of macOS kind of cheat when it comes to showing your drive information with the Finder. APFS boot drives are not partitioned in the same way they were previously, and the macOS and user files now reside on two separate volumes. "Macintosh HD" is where the critical macOS files and folders live, and "Macintosh HD - Data" is used for all of your user files and data.

When you look at your internal drive in a Finder window it will always appear to be a single volume named simply "Macintosh HD". You will never see "Macintosh HD - Data" as your drives name or location in Finder. The Disk Utility and Terminal apps can show you the differentiated drives, but not Finder. MacOS does this magic behind the scenes and, for better or worse, you won't see that. It's the cause of much confusion for many Mac users.

So, as posted above, you cannot delete the volume to free up storage space. The best you can do is remove your user data from the drive and store it on an external device.

What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out?

Free up storage space on your Mac

OmniDiskSweeper Safe to use

How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac

See used and available storage space on your Mac

The final word from Apple on Managing the " Other " Category

• Other: Contains files that don’t fall into the categories listed here. This category primarily includes files and data used by the system, such as log files, caches, VM files, and other runtime system resources. Also included are temporary files, fonts, app support files, and plug-ins. You can't manage the contents of this category. The contents are managed by macOS, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.

BrookeMO wrote:

Can I delete the HD Data Utility?

Hey there, I have a Macbook Pro (Retina 15in Mid 2015 running MacOS Catalina V10.15.7)

It has been full for a while now, and I keep deleting, cleaning, online syncing to Dropbox etc but the available space is not increasing.

When I looked into managing the space in disc utilities I found a 2nd drive called Macintosh HD Data that has 442gb used. I have attached 2 screenshots to show the data on both 'drives'

I have done a quick google and it looks like the HD data is a duplicate drive that occurs in the upgrade to Catalina.

My question is, can I delete this drive to get my space back!? Is it an old duplicate? Will it affect my main HD?

I do not know what "HD Data Utility" is referring to....

You also say " HD data is a duplicate drive"— I am not seeing a duplicate in the screen shots you posted...(?)

Back in 2019 w/ macOS 10.15 Catalina the Two Volume structure was introduced:

About the read-only system volume in macOS Catalina - Apple ...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650


Big Sur went one step further introducing a SSV (signed/sealed system volume) and continues in Monterey today.

From Disk Utility>View>Show All Devices you get a better picture of the overall structure of your parent Drive.

For a even better look from the Terminal.app copy & paste:

diskutil list internal

What you really need to do is some basic housekeeping either delete user data, or move data off the drive to an external storage if you want to preserve it.

Freeing storage — a couple ref links already provided above...

Empty your Trash — Delete files and folders on Mac - Apple Support

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/delete-files-and-folders-on-mac-mchlp1093/mac

available storage space on your Mac

https://support.apple.com/guide/system-information/see-available-storage-space-syspf9b375b9/10.14/mac/10.15

If in doubt try something like OmniDiskSweeper for a GUI to get a good look at itemized file size and location:

OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more

It never pays to get too far behind in the hardware or software...

that is not a duplicate drive. it's where the macOS puts your data. (photos, music, movies, 3rd party apps, etc etc) you can't delete the volume, but you can delete things stored on it from the volume.

please see Why you might see a new “Data” disk in Catalina