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It's not actually the APFS conversion that created the 'Data' partition, it's a Catalina security feature. In Catalina your system folder is read only (or meant to be - I've unlocked mine) so the system files that need to be modified go into a partition called 'Data'.
The data partition is meant to be hidden, it's not supposed to appear in Finder. MacOS uses firmlinks to make sure that all your files in the home directory/wherever get mapped to the right places. It sounds to me like those firmlinks are borked.
Are you saying that you can't access the files on the disk you backed up or the new copy?
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99% of my freelance gigs I’ve had to go to them. Maybe yours are different?
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If you're freelancing, get a laptop and an external monitor. With the reduction in price with the new MBP you can get a laptop and decent sized monitor for the price of last years MBP.
And Crucial for the memory.
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It should still work with an external display?
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A little 'buyer beware' story for anyone looking to buy a secondhand Mac. I bought a 2017 iMac from a bloke on the Bay a couple of months back. I was pretty cautious, or so I thought. He said he had a few that he'd bought for a music production company he was going to set up, but had changed his plans due to the lockdown. I looked him up on Google: he had a plausible Instagram account that was music related, and was a director of such a company on Companies House, registered at his home address. When I went over to see him, he'd done a clean Catalina install. I checked the system logs at his gaff to see what had been done with the machine post-install, saw a few things I didn't understand but put that down to not knowing Catalina particularly well. I paid £1300 and took the machine away. This was on a Friday.
Back home, in an abundance of caution, I cut a new Catalina install disk and started on a clean install. All fine, until the step where you put in your WiFi details. After connecting my WiFi, a pop-up window appeared asking for a username and password, and declaring that the machine was the property of a well-known UK company. I couldn't get beyond that window.
I phoned the seller and he said he hadn't had that problem as he hadn't connected it to his wifi during set-up. He was very stressed about the whole thing and called the guy who had sold it to him, who said we shouldn't worry as there was a workaround that he sent us a link to. Without going into details, it involved booting from the boot disk in Safe Mode, opening a terminal, and root-editing some hosts files. All very dodgy. I went through the process to see what happened but I'd already decided to call the company the machine apparently belonged to after the weekend.
What I discovered as I went through this process is that Apple runs a service for corporate customers that allows a company to register the Mac addresses of its machines with them so that as soon as they connect to the internet they can be subjected to remote management procedures by that company. This seems to be a firmware feature, so a clean install doesn't get you round it. Even if you can get the machine to boot to OS, it is repeatedly trying to find its owner (and failing, obviously, if you have over-written the hosts file).
On Monday, I called the company in question to let them know I had a machine that appeared to belong to them. My hope was that the machine had been sold off without being given proper attention from their IT asset management department, and that a call to the service desk would bring the issue to light and the machine could be taken out of the programme. I gave them the MAC address of the machine over the phone and the rather surprised helpdesk bloke confirmed that it was, indeed, one of theirs. I asked if it had been stolen, and if so whether I should report it to plod, but he said he didn't know. The ticket was then turned over to their fraud and security team, who called back in a few hours. They were incredibly helpful and supportive, and extremely grateful that I'd got in touch. At that point they still didn't know whether the machine had been stolen so advised me against reporting it to the police. Their main concern was data theft, and they asked if they could come and collect the machine for inspection.
They came round to pick up the machine the next day. I also gave them the details of the guy who'd sold me the machine, who was at this point distraught. After about a week, I got a call saying that the machine had been picked up along with some others from an office that had been closed just as Lockdown was starting, and in the chaos of that time had clearly gone astray. They hadn't been able to follow the crumbs up the chain from the guy who sold it to me, as the chap who sold the machines to him very quickly stopped responding to their calls.
They had initially said they would inspect and wipe the machine, take it out of the programme, and give it back, but instead they sent me a cheque for what I had paid for it, which they didn't have to do at all. They said it was a gesture of gratitude for bringing the matter to their attention.
It felt like a lucky escape. I could easily have been £1300 out of pocket, trying to recover funds from the rather hapless bloke who had sold the machine to me through the courts. I'm not sure I'll ever buy a secondhand computer again. Apart from requesting the original sales receipt (which might be difficult to get even from a first owner) or performing a clean install at the seller's house, I'm not sure what I could have differently in the circumstances.
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There's not a lot you can do in these circumstances. We have the Apple Asset Management stuff at work and all the devices can be tracked traced and remotely locked. It still doesn't stop people taking things and trying to sell them. It just means they're bricked when it's found out.
Depending on your conscience, even though you've been compensated separately by the original owner, you can still claim through eBay / Paypal for your purchase, you might still be covered.
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Working fine for me.
Fox
ExTra
kboy
Johnnyw75
CYOA
chrisbmx116
Muppetteer
Arvy.
Sharkstar
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7OOx23
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Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)
Posted by
@kowalski
Can't work off a laptop really, the screens aren't bit enough for the type of work I do