Yes, I still hear occasionally from folks who have been unable to successfully create a bootable clone using CarbonCopyCloner. However, folks using SuperDuper! (https://www.shirt-pocket.com) have been consistently successful.
Yes, it’s not as dead simple to create a bootable clone using SuperDuper! at it once was, but it’s still very easy. Nowadays you have to first install the Mac OS onto your external drive using Apple’s own installer, then you can backup to the drive normally using SuperDuper!, and it will be bootable.
This is one of the reasons why I recommend SD! for backing up, and no longer recommend CCC. There is a free demo of SD!, so users can try it out for themselves.
i need a new back up drive for my new MacAir, 512 gigs.
I was thinking 2T would be enough to back up the hard drive and partition for Time Machine. Is that enough capacity?
I have a lot of recent experience with this. We’ve had exhaustive discussions about it on various fora. I’ll share what I know, but it may ruffle a lot of feathers here among those who think that they have a handle on this, but who aren’t up to date.
First, TimeMachine in recent iterations (since Big Sur) automatically, and non-optionally, will reformat your external backup drive to APFS. APFS is optimized for SSD’s, and it turns a HDD (rotating drive hard disk) into a dog performance-wise. So these days you are going to want an SSD to backup to if at all possible. (Adam wrote an article extolling how miserable it is to work with a rotating disk backup drive formatted as APFS when your internal drive has failed.)
Second, you aren’t home free if you have an SSD backup drive. SSD’s tend to get slower and slower as they get closer and closer to being full. (I can provide a bunch of links for this, on request.) At some point a too full SSD becomes flaky and it may fail completely. This is a huge problem if your SSD is being used aa a TimeMachine backup drive.
TimeMachine is supposed to work by keeping archives of past backups, and then when it approaches being full it is supposed to start deleting the oldest backups to make room for newer backups. Lots of folks have been reporting that instead of behaving this way, as their TimeMachine backup on their SSD starts approaching being full, instead of clearing space it simply fails.
I haven’t heard of a direct fix to avoid this sort of failure. It may be that since few external SSD’s support Apple’s implementation of TRIM, that using a drive that does support Apple’s implementation of TRIM would avoid the problem. I don’t know yet. In the meantime, some folks avoid the problem entirely by buying an external backup SSD that’s a good deal larger than their internal drive, so that it never approaches being full. Getting an SSD for use with TimeMachine that is four times as large as your internal drive isn’t unreasonably large.
So, which external SSD would I recommend that you purchase? An ideal external SSD would almost certainly be too expensive for most users to consider purchasing. AngelBird made SSD’s for the Mac that were close to ideal, and they were so expensive that no one bought them and they were discontinued. Here are just some of the things to look for, ideally, in an SSD:
ASM2464PD/PDX controller
interface: PCIe 4x4
NVMe flash
a good amount of DRAM
a significant amount of over-provisioning
support for Apple’s TRIM
support for SMART
support for USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 or 4
SLC (single-layer cell) NAND memory
positive cooling to avoid thermal throttling
You aren’t going to find an SSD with all or most of those at consumer prices. (We can discuss the need for each one of those features at some future time.) So what you want is something that is a good compromise. Something with reasonable performance, and reasonable reliability and stability, all at a decent price. (The best compromise might be to put an external SSD together yourself using a quality case kit, but I realize that few ordinary users are interested in taking on such a project.)
That all said, Samsung offers some external SSD’s that are very attractive for what they offer, and hence very popular. They perform fairly well when new, and they are inexpensive.
SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD, 2TB External Solid State Drive
$170
I was looking at Western Digital Passport.
Just about anything, other than a high-end raw internal rotating disk drive mechanism, that comes from Western Digital these days is going to be a POS. You may hear from individuals that tell you that they bought something from WD recently and it was “fine”, but overall, products from WD these days tend to be extremely cheaply made, and tend to have a shamefully high failure rate.
I have been using Super Duper for years, When I start SD, one of the actions it says it does is to make the external drive bootable. Are you saying that it doesn’t do that any more? I ran Super Duper on my 2010 MacBook Pro with High Sierra. I now have a 2023 MacBook Air with Sonoma. Will Super Duper act differently and NOT make the SSD external drive bootable?
You’re describing two completely different procedures as if they are the same.
When you tell CCC to make a bootable backup, it uses Apple’s APFS Replicator (“ASR”) utility (the tool Apple uses to place system images on newly-manufactured systems) to duplicate both the signed system volume and the data volume. So your backup is a clone of the source system. And yes, it has problems, mostly because ASR is undocumented and has bugs when used to clone a system (vs. imaging a storage device from a source image file).
The procedure you describe (clean-install macOS, then clone your system’s data volume to its data volume) is different. It is not attempting to clone the system. It only clones the data volume, which all backup utilities do just fine. But it also means that the destination’s system volume is not necessarily the same as the source’s system volume - they’ll only match if you install the exact same version of macOS, including the same internal build number, which may not be possible.
The SD procedure you describe may work just fine, but it is not the same as cloning the bootable system, and you can do the same thing with CCC, should you choose to do so. Mike Bombich actually recommends that you do this (or install macOS over your clone of the data volume, if you did that first), and that use of ASR is not recommended, but is provided as an option for those who explicitly want/need it.
Yes and no. Yes, creating a new TM volume will reformat it to APFS. And yes, APFS does not perform well on HDD media. But for TM-style backups, where you are generally just adding new snapshots, the performance is perfectly acceptable.
I wouldn’t want to use an APFS-formatted HDD for my active system/data volumes, but I haven’t experienced any performance issues when used for TM. Probably because TM itself is not a high-performance utility, and doesn’t need super fast storage media.
Regarding SuperDuper!'s ability to clone a signed-sealed-volume…
On an Intel Mac, it works. It uses asr to clone the entire drive. After that clone, you can update the data volume incrementally.
On my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, it can also do an asr clone, but the result was not bootable. This is due to a bug in asr, where at the end it doesn’t build a necessary dynld cache. I think I was trying this with Ventura, it may be fixed in Sonoma.
The work around I used was to use the stand-alone Ventura installer after the failed clone to update the Ventura SSV volume on the clone, which repaired it.
I expect the asr bug will be fixed at some point. And to be clear, this is not a bug in SuperDuper. SuperDuper!, like CCC, is at the mercy of asr when it comes to copying the signed-sealed-volume.
Correct, if you expect SD! to create a bootable clone just by running SD!. Read the blog on ShirtPocket Software’s Web site (and I assume in the latest documentation) and you will find that the procedure for creating a bootable clone on a recent Mac is now as I laid out.
By the way, for folks putting words in my mouth, the problem with using a rotating disk hard drive formatted as APFS as a backup drive isn’t the speed with which the clone can be made, it’s the horrible performance of the drive if you have to do a restore. Folks should go back and read Adam’s article about this.
That is clearly not what it says. I quote from the last Sonoma blog entry:
Backing Up on Big Sur and Later
As has been the case since Big Sur, the general way to use SuperDuper is:
Start with an Erase, then copy backup, which will use Apple’s tool to replicate the OS.
Update that backup with “Backup - all files” with “Smart Update” in between OS updates.
When you want to update the OS on the backup, repeat the “Erase, then copy”.
One thing that’s important to remember is that you can install the OS over the backup at any time to update it. That will update the OS and system applications, while leaving your data, settings and applications intact.
This means that even if you forget to update the OS, you can do it later…and, you can restore even if you don’t have an OS on the backup at all.
The instructions are still that you should be able to do a full clone (“Erase, then Copy”), which uses asr.
It is just that for some people, in some cases, this doesn’t work, and then you need work-arounds. Maybe, I haven’t tried it in Sonoma.
The change in recommendations from SD! is that when you’re trying to restore to a machine that you didn’t clone from (e.g. use the clone to migrate from an old computer to a new computer), you must install macOS (if not already installed) and then on first boot use macOS to restore (really, migrate) from the clone’s data. And I think there may be other restrictions on when you can clone back to an Apple Silicon internal drive.
Most of those points just make the solution expensive without offering any real benefit to TM application. TM backups (and restore from backup!) are heavily i/o throttled by macOS itself. So right off the bat for TM use you can forget about fast flash, TB4, the ASM2464, DRAM, or cooling. Those are all great to have if this were about an external SSD for actual performance tasks. But for TM backup, which is what this thread is about, those excess wish list checkboxes amount to just wasting money. For TM backup you want something reliable that’s inexpensive. With the money saved you buy the extra safety net (2nd backup, more rotations, more capacity). Not performance you can’t and won’t exploit.
As someone who worked in print and digital advertising sales for longer than I care to admit I am old, who has subscribed to the NYT since she was in 6th grade and required to read it, I think I am qualified to attest that “All The News That Is Fit To Print” is 100% true. The NYT does not exchange editorial for advertising.
And my husband, who is a professional news journalist, is another major NYT daily reader since seventh grade at another school. He has never had a problem with WireCutter’s recommendations either.
I am SO embarrassed to admit this – I have had the Crucial back up drive for Time Machine and Samsung Shield for my hard drive for weeks, but I am scared to install them on my MacBook Air! I haven’t installed a drive since 2010! I don’t know the formatting and what to select, etc… Please give me instructions on how to format and set up the drives. ( I am assuming I don’t partition them since my hard drive is 5xx gigs.) It’s Ok to assume I know nothing!!!
Time Machine: Crucial SSD X9, 2 TB
Back up hard drive with Super Duper: Samsung T7 shield, 2 TB
If you connect a brand new disk, macOS will ask if you want to format it. If you say yes, you’ll get Disk Utility options. Otherwise you can go straight to DiskUtility and format the drive.
You want to select APFS as the format and GUID Partition map as the scheme. For a TM partition it doesn’t matter what you select because once you tell TM to use that disk, it will first reformat it to whatever it needs anyway. For APFS you can choose Case-sensitive. And Encrypted if you like. Encryption is nice because it means that if somebody gets ahold of your disk, any data they access on it will be scrambled. Only you with the encryption key (disk password) can unscramble the bits to make sensible data out of it — but of course the price to pay is that you need to safeguard this password at all cost. If you lose it, you will lose all data. Good news is that macOS keychain can store this encryption key for you together with your other sensitive passwords. It will also auto-unlock the disk for you whenever you connect and mount it. On a modern Mac the overhead from this encryption is negligible.
Since you want to store both TM and a SD backup on the same disk, you’ll need to partition it. My suggestion would be to use one common APFS container with 2 volumes (excellent primer on what those mean and how to set them up here courtesy of Howard Oakley). That way either volume can gobble up the remaining free space dynamically when it needs to. If you were to use 2 separate APFS containers that gives you more separation between the two (which can be good), but it also means you need to allocate from the start a certain ratio between space set aside for SD partition vs. TM partition and changing that later can be a pain.
I cannot finish without saying that I personally am not a huge fan of using the same physical disk for two separate backups. The two separate backups using two different mechanisms is absolutely awesome because it, among others, safeguards you against bugs in either backup tool and thus presents an extra safety net. However, if you had these two backups on two separate physical disks, you’d also safeguard against disk failure and hardware damage (say you drop that drive). That safety net you give up (at least to some degree) when you resort to putting SD and TM backups on the same disk. So I usually recommend using two separate disks and ideally even in different locations to add that extra layer (say your house burns down). But of course with that said, if you already have another extra safety net it can very well be that sharing one physical drive for two other backup strategies is just fine. Just something to consider — backups want to be well thought out in advance.
Simon, thanks for the advice, but you missed an important item: I am using the Crucial for Time machine back up only. and the Samsung is for the SSD drive.
If you plug in a truly blank drive, you’ll get that notice - I frequently see that when connecting a home-built drive for the first time.
But commercial external drives usually come pre-formatted with some variation of the FAT file system, so they usually just auto-mount when you connect them. If this happens, you should go to Disk Utility and erase/repartition the drive as you described.
I’m pretty sure that if you connect the new drive to your Mac, your Mac will ask you if you want to use it as a Time Machine drive after a few moments. If you agree, it will handle any necessary formatting for you.
My Mac did NOT ask me anything. I went to Disk Utility as advised —and didn’t know what to do next (remember I said I didn’t know how/what to do?) . So I Googled how to format a drive and the answer was ERASE! So I did choose APFS, but to Encrypt or not??? My crooked fingers chose to Encrypt. So I spent minutes trying to figure out a weird and long password, typed it in twice —and they didn’t match! Finally got a match and proceeded.
I tried to save that password in 1Password and Keychain, but it wouldn’t accept it. I suspect it was because I didn’t enter a website. I don’t know WHAT website to enter! Then I registered the Crucial drive and that worked Ok. The Crucial drive is now Time Machine and working. Thank you all for trying t help me.
P.S> Can I UN-encrypt the Time Machine drive? I figure since I can’t save it to 1Password nor Keychain, the chances of me forgetting where I put the password or remembering it are fair-good.