Most improved utility: macOS Monterey’s Disk Utility

Howard Oakley:

As it’s getting towards the end of the year, I’ve been on the look out for nominations for the title of the most improved utility of the year. I’m delighted to announce not just a nomination, but an outright winner: Disk Utility 21.0, bundled with Monterey. After four years in which it had offered frustratingly limited support for the new features of APFS, Disk Utility is now complete: this version has excellent support for snapshots, no matter which app created them.

If you’ve got Monterey installed, fire up Disk Utility (it’s in Applications > Utilities). Take a look at the various menu items, most importantly:

To engage its new powers, select a volume and use the Show APFS Snapshots command in its View menu. This opens a new table view in the lower part of the main view in which the selected volume’s snapshots are listed.

Those snapshots will appear in a new section at the bottom of the main pane. Jump back to Howard’s walkthrough to get a sense of what you can do with these.