NOTE: Be advised that you are wholeheartedly discouraged from deleting one of the volumes in Disk Utility unless you’re really feeling irresistible urge to reinstall Catalina. If you happen to be using Disk Utility on Mojave or an older macOS edition, you can click Mount to make the hidden Data volume appear on the desktop as a separate volume. The Data volume holds your account’s Home folder and other stuff.Ĭhoose the option Show in Finder from the contextual menu and you’ll realize the files you’re seeing originate from two separate volumes, you’re just seeing one volume. Launch Disk Utility on your Catalina-powered computer and you should your System and Data volumes in the lefthand column. With Disk Utility, you can see and manage volumes that are available to the system, including unmounted ones. The interesting part is, these two volumes appear in the Finder and throughout the system as a single, unified volume although a savvy user can view them separately by talking a look at Apple’s Disk Utility app. The installer also creates a brand new volume with the System role. The Catalina installer renames the startup volume to “Macintosh HD – Data” (assuming your boot volume has the default title “Macintosh HD”) and assigns it the Data role. In other words, Catalina protects the OS in its own read-only volume.
#MACOS INSTALL DATA FOLDER SOFTWARE#
It’s this separation of the two boot volumes that Apple hopes will help your Mac maintain integrity of the macOS operating system by preventing potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your computer.Ĭatalina runs in a dedicated, read-only volume - meaning it’s completely separate from all other data and nothing can overwrite your critical operating system files.