This might be of interest to some of us:
Commercial apps like SD and CCC use ASR when asked to make a bootable backup of a modern macOS installation. This article discusses how to manually run ASR, if you have a need to do it by hand (maybe because you don’t want to buy an SD or CCC license).
A wise man once told me “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
Mike Bombich (Carbon Copy Cloner developer) explicitly discourages using CCC to create bootable clones. See his December 2024 blog post Bootable backups have been deprecated for several years - Bombich Software, Take note of Mike’s conversations with Apple when reading the post.
Joe Kissell’s excellent “Take Control of Backing up your Mac” e-book, and a plethora of posts from Howard Oakley on https://eclecticlight.co also stongly discourage this practice.
If you’re still thinking about using bootable clones with Big Sur and later, it’s time to rethink how and why you are doing them. You should adjust your workflow accordingly to use newer methods of creating and maintaining those clones (that don’t involve use of ASR).
No disagreement here, but you’re missing the point of the article.
Every bootable-backup solution that doesn’t involve explicitly installing macOS over a data backup uses the ASR tool, which is not documented very well. The AI article provides lots of useful information for those who want to just run ASR on their own without buying any third-party software.
No disagreement here either. But when Mike Bombich stands up and says “don’t do it”, I listen.
The article is long with way too many steps. It’s going to be easy for anyone to miss a step and get into trouble. I’ve also found AppleInsider “technical” articles to have inaccuracies (or flat out misinformation) too many times for me feel comfortable about using their advice without a great deal of my own testing.
It’s much easier and less error-prone to use newer procedures to install macOS on the external disk using the installer, then restore and maintain the updated data. Lots of articles and books on how to do that (such as those by Bombich, Howard Oakley, and Joe Kissell).
(One of the duties of my professional career was to guide users away from the cliff that they didn’t see - but I knew was there. Too many times they’d drive off it and complain – when it could have been prevented.)