It's not possible to make bootable backups of macOS Big Sur | Hacker News Reader

It's not possible to make bootable backups of macOS Big Sur

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49 pointstheanirudh21 comments

From Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1.22-b1 release notes[0]:

"This build continues our beta testing cycle for macOS 'Big Sur' 11. In the current macOS beta, CCC will create Data Volume backups of any Big Sur startup volumes. Apple's APFS replication utility is not currently capable of replicating a Big Sur System volume (as of Big Sur Beta 6). We're working with Apple to develop the functionality within macOS that will allow third-party backup applications to continue making backups of macOS System volumes. In the meantime, we're making complete backups of your data, and those backups can be seamlessly used alongside the macOS Installer or Migration Assistant to produce a bootable backup or to facilitate a restore."

[0] https://bombich.com/software/updates/ccc5_rn_beta.html

“At present.”

The submitted headline misrepresents this post.

From the post:

“At present, it's not possible to make bootable copies of Big Sur, even with asr, Apple's own built-in replication utility. As such, we haven't released a Beta, or even an internal Alpha, because it wouldn't meet our own requirements.

So, for the moment, we're holding back, hoping that Apple will fix the issues [...]”

I had senior support agents from Apple support tell me that they do not advice doing bootable APFS backups, since it interferes with the ids the T2 chip somehow burns into the file system for "security" reasons.

At our company we try to buy refurbished T2 free hardware only for this reason.

We'll probably jump ship if a great surface studio 3 comes out.

After almost 40 years of being a Mac Design shop...

We're just sad and want 2005 back.

What are your main issues with T2?

The one he/she mentioned in is enough incentive for me: I don't want only ever to be able to boot off an internal drive!

I can boot my T2 equipped Mac Mini off an external drive. This is how I am testing Big Sur.

Can and "well supported and reliable enough that apple does not advise against it" are two different things tho, when it comes to day to day production use at a company.

Only apple can repair your machine. You no longer own your machine, they do.

Was it worth the extra protection from governments or malicious entities trying to extract your data?

I had to reinstall a T2 machine for someone and it was a nightmare of connect to internet, 2fa and password resets.

Without a public commitment from apple to make this possible, what reason is there to assume this is going to change?

Just to be clear:

I am not commenting on the likelihood of Apple to change this, or whether they should or should not.

I am only saying that the submitted headline misrepresents the post.

> hoping that Apple will fix the issues

Title correctly represents that hope as specious, and as all titles only need to depict the current reality, "at present" can always be elided.

This would be a huge problem for me, and I will not consider upgrading to Big Sur until it’s fixed. I currently create bootable backups of my Mac, the idea being that if the internal drive goes, I can switch to the backup while the machine is being repaired. I’ve had to resort to that on several occasions.

I‘d honestly be pretty surprised if Apple eliminated bootable backups. It’s just too important. The fact that it’s a power-user feature should not be a disqualifier. Lots of Apple users fall into that category, and I think Apple already has some work ahead of it to restore good faith with those folks.

Apple does it again lmao

Likely won’t be. I doubt booting from removable media will be supported much longer in post-T2 Apple-land. If Apple Silicon devices support it I will be quite surprised.

I think they already confirmed at WWDC that external device booting is supported. Lots of use cases become impossible without it: reinstalling older OSes, reinstalling without internet access, bootable backups, installing a beta on an external drive, etc etc.

  Lots of use cases become impossible without it

That may be the point. I doubt a majority of users ever go near Disk Utility (certainly not ditto, rsync, etc)

MacOS sand-boxing won't give the user write access to the System folder, anyways. Apple management might not see the point in a user booting externally, when they could move their User data to an external drive, instead.

If Apple walls off the ability to boot off an external drive, it's bad for 'power users', but good, in some ways, for Apple: stronger lock-in, tighter security, easier to sell higher-spec'd Macs (ie: with larger hdd's), and more iCloud subscriptions (cloud storage).

Similar maintenance use cases have been removed in the past due to non-removable RAM & SSDs. Only an Apple Store can now do backups from dead machines.

If the new macs do boot external drives, I would not be surprised if it's severely "nerfed" - I don't expect _any_ access to the onboard storage, for example (which would break all the use-cases you listed anyway).

As it is I have been unable to reinstall my iMac Pro without internet access from a bootable USB drive; it seems to insist on internet recovery. Also, I think they explicitly want to disable booting of older OS versions as that is an attack vector for boot security.

On T2 Macs those are both disabled by default, but can be enabled with the Startup Security Utility in recovery mode.

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