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I just learned that the "shrinking APFS data structures" phase of creating a partition on a mac can take many hours, often overnight and I need to go from one place to another but I started the process just an hour or so ago. Is it safe to close the laptop while I'm on the go?

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  • This will happen quicker if done from macOS recovery.
    – David Anderson
    Commented Jul 31, 2020 at 19:53

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Interrupting the operation for any reason in the middle of it, like putting the laptop in sleep might (in case of sleep) or WILL (in case of everything else) corrupt the filesystem badly.

It may take more or less time as it moves around the data blocks from the place which is going to be removed from the partition. Depending on the arrangement of data on your disk as well as your general storage device performance it could take anywhere from 2 minutes (I had a new partition so I fell into this case) to several hours (if a lot of data needs to be relocated).

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It is always a good rule of thumb to not resize the currently booted partition. If you only have one partition, boot into recovery mode:

  • on older systems, hold ⌘+R on startup.
  • on newer systems, hold the power button after shutting down until it says loading startup options, then select "options"

Then select disk utility, and resize the disk from there. When you are done, close disk utility and reboot the system.

Note: if you want to install macOS on a newly-created partition, you can also do this from recovery mode by selecting "reinstall macOS" and selecting the partition you just created.

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