Info on /System/Volumes/Data/home

Question

lucaseverini OP

Created Mar ’22

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Hello everybody,

Does someone knowledgeable know why on macOS (11.6.2 Big Sur at list in my case), there is that mounted volume /System/Volumes/Data/home that is usually empty (at least for me) and appears to be a kinda of network volume that (of course for a network volume) doesn't support the fast searchfs functionality ? What's its use?

For some context, here is the list of mounted volumes on my MacBook Pro with two volumes visible on the Desktop, Macintosh HD (/ + /System/Volumes/Data) and Data (/Volumes/Data) :

/dev/disk1s1s1 (apfs): /
devfs (devfs): /dev (doesn't support searchfs)
/dev/disk1s5 (apfs): /System/Volumes/VM
/dev/disk1s3 (apfs): /System/Volumes/Preboot
/dev/disk1s6 (apfs): /System/Volumes/Update
/dev/disk1s2 (apfs): /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk1s7 (apfs): /Volumes/Data
map auto_home (autofs): /System/Volumes/Data/home (doesn't support searchfs)

Thank you!

Best regards,

Luca Severini

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Mar ’22

why on macOS [is] there [a] mounted volume /System/Volumes/Data/home that is usually empty

This is tied to the automount system. That’s not really my area of expertise but you learn more in the automount man page and other pages linked to from that.

Why do you care? My general advice is that you ignore volumes that you’re not interested in. If you need to show a list of volumes to the user, hide any volume with the MNT_DONTBROWSE flag set.

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