Originally Posted by plantsower
Originally Posted by artie505
It depends upon what's in that folder. I've found it to almost exclusively contain stuff that can be safely trashed, BUT one time the file with all my stored passwords was in it...and I trashed it without thinking. frown
Yikes! I don't see any passwords or anything I can relate to, but I will leave it unless JoeMike says I can trash it.

I'm with Artie on that. If you look closely at the item on your desktop, it is NOT the actual folder but an alias of the real folder that is buried somewhere deep in the bowels of your system. I used to right-click (⌘+click) on the alias, select Show Original, navigate from there to the original folder, delete it, then delete the alias. Now I just delete the alias and let it go at that.

Originally Posted by plantsower
Originally Posted by artie505
The 11 GB sounds like your system volume, and the 28 GB volume is your data volume.
. Hmmm, ok. I won't mess with it. In fact I am tired of messing with my Mac's innards. Hopefully, I can keep my hands out of its deep recesses for awhile. I don't know why I feel the need to do all that. It just gets me in trouble.

My advice to you is don't worry about that kind of thing until you are comfortable with the day-to-day operation of Catalina and have everything running smoothly. Then, say in another month or two, and if you are interested, we can get into a discussion of how Catalina is organized and at least some of the "why". In fact, there are four other volumes on your internal drive, only two of which you can see without special software. In the meantime, focus on Macintosh HD - Data is the only thing you need to worry about and the only one you have write access to. (Big Sur adds even more constraints.)


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein