{"id":39415,"date":"2023-05-17T15:47:12","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T19:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=39415"},"modified":"2023-05-17T15:47:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T19:47:12","slug":"volume-names-mount-points-and-normalisation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/17\/volume-names-mount-points-and-normalisation\/","title":{"rendered":"Volume Names, Mount Points, and Normalisation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2023\/05\/16\/volume-names-mount-points-and-normalisation\/\">Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2023\/05\/16\/volume-names-mount-points-and-normalisation\/\"><p>[The] current Data volume, by default named either <code>Macintosh HD - Data<\/code> (Intel) or simply <code>Data<\/code> (Apple silicon), isn&rsquo;t mounted in \/Volumes at all, but at \/System\/Volumes\/Data. This article looks at another situation where APFS volumes will appear at mount points that differ from their volume name, when there&rsquo;s the potential for a name collision, such as one resulting from Unicode normalisation.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>The last time that I looked at the <a href=\"https:\/\/eclecticlight.co\/2021\/07\/01\/volume-names-are-still-a-unicode-mess\/\">state of normalisation<\/a> in APFS, almost two years ago, I found there were still issues and bugs, most weirdly with the fact that a volume whose name contains composed forms (Form C) was inaccessible to Spotlight indexing. That wasn&rsquo;t helped by the fact that, unlike the Finder, Disk Utility doesn&rsquo;t normalise the names of APFS volumes, and lets you create two volumes in the same container that differ only in their normalisation, and appear identical to the user.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>APFS and Disk Utility are very flexible when it comes to naming volumes. If you want, you can mix cases across volumes that aren&rsquo;t case-sensitive, and even use exactly the same name for as many volumes as you want, because the file system doesn&rsquo;t identify volumes by name. What&rsquo;s most important to APFS is the UUID of the volume: try mounting two volumes with identical UUIDs and you&rsquo;ll see what I mean.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>What happens is that the volume name is normalised to Unicode Form D, or decomposed, and compared without case-sensitivity to existing mount paths. If there&rsquo;s any clash, then a number is appended after the normalised name to form the additional mount path.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/09\/apple-platform-security-february-2021\/\">Apple Platform Security Guide (February 2021)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/02\/is-big-surs-system-volume-sealed\/\">Is Big Sur&rsquo;s System Volume Sealed?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/27\/apfs-native-normalization\/\">APFS Native Normalization<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Howard Oakley: [The] current Data volume, by default named either Macintosh HD - Data (Intel) or simply Data (Apple silicon), isn&rsquo;t mounted in \/Volumes at all, but at \/System\/Volumes\/Data. This article looks at another situation where APFS volumes will appear at mount points that differ from their volume name, when there&rsquo;s the potential for a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2023-05-17T19:47:14Z","apple_news_api_id":"ce3e0e60-38f4-4502-9726-5fb94a3449be","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2023-05-17T19:47:14Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Azj4OYDj0RQKXJl-5SjRJvg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1395,538,475,2223,2277,1042,174,258],"class_list":["post-39415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple-file-system-apfs","tag-diskutility","tag-mavericks","tag-macos-13-ventura","tag-signed-system-volume-ssv","tag-spotlight","tag-storage","tag-unicode"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39416,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39415\/revisions\/39416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}