Trying to understand these volumes that show on my reformatted Mac

I installed Monterey on my 2014 iMac. It now shows me some new volumes - there’s a system volume, startup snapshot and a data volume.



Did I install the OS on a wrong space? I think there was just one under the internal volume group before I reformatted.

Nope. What you see is normal. Macintosh HD is your read-only system drive.

Macintosh HD - Data contains your User Accounts and

Macintosh HD snapshot contains “rolling copies of a drive’s state so you can easily restore in case something goes horribly wrong”.

Disk Utility in macOS 12 Monterey Manages APFS Snapshots - TidBITS

You aren’t the only one who had questions the first time he saw this. :grinning:

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Thanks a lot! I was worried if I did something to the drive

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