Dave Nanian’s SuperDuper is a superb tool and as an independent developer his responsiveness to questions and his resourcefulness under Mac OS X and macOS is inspiring.
Apple is making a lot of unpredictable moves in the name of security and a lot of uncertainty now surrounds the future of bootable backups as protection against catastrophic data loss and/or transformation.
It’s good to see SuperDuper have a partial path forward. I’m crossing fingers Apple will be able to reshape its security paradigm while enabling third-party backup software to create bootable backups for Apple Silicon machines.
That's a fair question, but I don't want to answer it. It's a little like asking 'what's your use-case for scissors?' in that it would take a couple days of prolonged reflection to answer comprehensively. Whatever I come up with in twenty minutes won't be the half of it. The effect of appending use-cases later, even if they are important ones, will be to make them sound as though they aren't (ie: 'if that's important why didn't they think of it immediately?').
> Note that, as I indicated above, M1 Macs can't readily boot from external drives. There are things you can do, if you have an external Thunderbolt 3 drive (USB-C isn't sufficient), but even that won't work if the internal drive is dead.
I’m trying to understand the impact of the internal drive dying in the last fragment here. Since these Macs have soldered-on-the-board SSD internal storage, wouldn’t the drive dying require a complete logic board replacement in the first place, which means this condition is not salvageable for an end user without professional repair service anyway? It’s not like an end user could replace it like with Macs of the past (or is it?).
On a general note, it’s extremely irritating when Apple drops macOS support for some Macs every year while the latest version still has several limitations and bugs. Anyone who gets on to the latest and greatest version of macOS with hardware that’s older than five years would be taking big risks. In general (with several exceptions), the longevity of the hardware was one of the attractive factors while paying a premium for Macs (also lesser e-waste is a bonus). But deeper problems in macOS could more than offset such benefits (resulting in more cries about planned obsolescence).
>Anyone who gets on to the latest and greatest version of macOS with hardware that’s older than five years would be taking big risks. In general (with several exceptions), the longevity of the hardware was one of the attractive factors while paying a premium for Macs (also lesser e-waste is a bonus). But deeper problems in macOS could more than offset such benefits (resulting in more cries about planned obsolescence).
This has been a problem since the advent of downloaded OS installations (complete move as of 10.7). Other software, too. With Mac OS, some portion is only a little past a beta state, and some hardware gets cut off before that same portion of the OS gets better. While I'd prefer how it used to be—an OS was largely stable and feature complete when shipped (on a disc or disk)—there's no reason for me to think that approach will ever return.
> I have to admit that not being able to boot from an external drive really caught my attention.
You can boot from an external Thunderbolt drive, it's USB drives that people have been having trouble with.
>In researching the process, various Mac users have found success with non-Thunderbolt 3 drives, but under oddly specific circumstances without any real rhyme or reason for them working. Save yourself the time and just use a Thunderbolt 3 drive from the outset.
From what I've understood, on the M1 Macs, the boot firmware lives on the same NAND flash chips as the internal drive. So if that flash dies, you're screwed anyhow and an external disk wouldn't have saved you
In the past, you could copy a bootable volume just by dragging its contents, and you could run Finder straight off the install media. Today I guess Apple finds it eccentric for a user to expect to create a simple backup.
...are you talking about OS9? In OS X I'm pretty sure you've always had to explicitly mark a volume as bootable. (Not complicated, but more complicated than just dragging contents over.)
Copying the full filesystem should've worked for OS X too, though not copying merely the contents (i.e., you need FS-level metadata).
But yes, from OS X you needed a secondary boot loader (BootX) to be discovered by OpenFirmware, whereas for classic Mac OS OpenFirmware itself found the payload to boot (which differed between Old World and New World systems).
No, it wasn't, so you could make a backup drive and boot from it directly by just copying the contents in Finder. But never in OS X. Which is why GP confused me...
Why the extreme sarcasm? Apple apparently thinks it's eccentric for users to clone their internal storage. I think they have the numbers to support it as well. Making Time Machine backups is very convenient.
What I've done personally, is started making backups to an SSD. In the event of a problem, I buy a new Mac and restore it to that, in a very fast manner. This means that, including shopping, roughly half a day of work will be lost. This is acceptable to me.
If you really can't wait, then don't sell your old Mac and keep it around for as long as it's supported.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather Apple didn't drop this function. But I do understand that cloning is a feature that's not used much, and that temporarily falls by the wayside in the development process.
> What I've done personally, is started making backups to an SSD. In the event of a problem, I buy a new Mac and restore it to that, in a very fast manner. This means that, including shopping, roughly half a day of work will be lost. This is acceptable to me.
I do something similar. I run Time Machine backups, then have what I call “hot backups.” These are CCC bootable clones to a zippy external SSD. I update them every 4 hours.
Also, most of my crucial data is “cloudy,” in things like GitHub.
APFS has the new “split” system, with a separate “data” volume. This can be used for Restore Mode rebuilds.
I have not had to rely on a full backup restore from Time Machine in years. The hot backup has been fine. It also means that I don’t have an issue wiping my computer and taking it in for service. I have the luxury of having a backup device (usually a couple of years older model of my primary).
The expectation is that users should have up-to-date external backups, and the internal drive should be treated as an ephemeral cache. You should already be prepared for the circumstances that your laptop gets stolen or that the actual flash chips or controllers break anyway, so if just the logic boards break you use the same recovery plan.
All IT professionals know that quickly restoreable external backups are really the good and proper way, but the reality is that we're only human and most of us fall short of the ideal (just like with exercising, eating healthy, maintaining your teeth, etc).
Google's approach with ChromeOS is to force you to treat the laptop storage as a cache by technical means, rather than as primary storage. iOS and Android also largely use that model. Windows and MacOS are clearly heading in the same direction, they're just moving slower due to legacy.
Agree Apple should reverse course wrt their control freakery. When I bought my PowerBook in 2003, Mac OS (10.3, 10.4) was fantastic in this regard, being able to boot off a FireWire drive, with OpenFirmware a much more powerful boot loader compared to the archaic pre-UEFI PC BIOS. You could also just use another Mac's boot disk.
Today (well, for years now), Mac OS can only be upgraded with Apple's installer. Went to an Apple reseller to buy a hard-disk with Mac OS (Mojave or earlier) to test-upgrade my old Mac Mini and whether my somewhat involved builds still work, only to find out that the old Mac Mini's firmware can't boot from APFS, and a firmware upgrade for APFS isn't a separate download like it used to be but comes only as part of Apple's monolithic online install.
This is very significant for delivering/testing Mac OS apps on newer OSes, and in particular to F/OSS developers who can't always go with the program and buy new hardware all the time. It's also relevant with audio and video professionals who need their driver- and timing-sensitive rig to work rather than going through yearly upgrade treadmills.
Both articles say the command line tool asr (Apple Software Restore) is the only Apple-approved way to do make a bootable copy. CCC says they're using asr. Both articles also say asr currently won't make a bootable copy of an M1-based Mac.
Both articles seem to imply Apple is dropping the ball on supporting tools for the partition/system changes they're making. The CCC seems more like a rallying cry:
> If Apple ships macOS Big Sur without fixing the underlying utilities that facilitate creating a bootable backup, you can choose to defer the upgrade. There is no urgency, no impetus to upgrade to macOS Big Sur. If we defer the upgrade choice, that sends a clear message that we're willing to wait for Apple to deliver quality software, rather than hitting an artificial deadline with an OS that's not ready.
>Right now you can install Big Sur onto your CCC backup to make it bootable, and in the future we'll use Apple's APFS replication utility (ASR) to clone the Big Sur System volume. Apple has assured us that they are working towards fixing the problems in ASR that prevent it from cloning the Big Sur System volume.
So, there is a bug that needs fixing, and until then you'll have to install the OS on top of your backup as a separate step.
As for Apple Silicon Macs:
>CCC is a native application on Apple Silicon and is 100% compatible with Apple Silicon Macs. CCC will automatically proceed with a Data Volume backup when backing up an APFS Volume Group on Apple Silicon Macs — that's a complete backup of your data, applications, and system settings. If you would like to make your Apple Silicon Mac backup bootable, you can install Big Sur onto the CCC Data Volume backup.
I actually just used SuperDuper! this weekend to clone my (still on Catalina) hard disk and then boot from it. It's just such a peace of mind to try and see your backup working and to know I could just resume work immediately if (when) the hard disk dies. I'd consider this a major part of a sane computing experience.
It’s worthy noting that bootable backups are almost a unique oddity of Mac OS X - though you can clone Linux and Windows systems I’ve not heard of people doing it regularly for backups.
It used to be so simple. I remember in Snow Leopard times you just open Disk Utility, and ask it to clone a volume onto a different volume, then reboot holding Option, and the newly cloned volume would appear. CCC only made this simple process efficient by allowing incremental backup powered by rsync. That simplicity is long lost.
> That's surprisingly shitty for such a premium product, especially coming from a company that claims to be reducing e-waist.
Apple was the first vendor to glue-in batteries inside all of their laptops effectively forcing people to upgrade every 2-3 years when battery life degrades. Their "e-waste" and "green economy" posture is pure hypocrisy.
I wonder what knowledge the Hackintosh community has on this, since they've still been able to run BigSur on non-Apple hardware as well as do things that others have claimed were not possible, like resealing the system volume. (Sadly, the Internet is overrun with people parroting the same "facts" so it's hard to find the real truth --- I remember coming across mentions of the former in some of the very long Hackintosh forum threads.)
Big Sur on M1 hardware behaves extremely differently from Big Sur on Intel hardware. The last part of the original post pertains to M1 hardware requiring the contents of the disk even though booting from external usb drives.
As far as I know, there are NO hackintosh arm64 macs (ie running Big Sur on a Graviton2 instance or ARM Neoverse N1 dev kit, for example), so be aware of who/what you are reading, caveat emptor, etc applies both ways, to what you are reading from the Hackintosh community as well.
Apple is making a lot of unpredictable moves in the name of security and a lot of uncertainty now surrounds the future of bootable backups as protection against catastrophic data loss and/or transformation.
It’s good to see SuperDuper have a partial path forward. I’m crossing fingers Apple will be able to reshape its security paradigm while enabling third-party backup software to create bootable backups for Apple Silicon machines.