Because they are installed via Configurator using a mechanism similar to how firmware files are installed on Intel Macs. And installation will create the pre-boot APFS containers in addition to installing firmware and macOS.
The name also distinguishes them from the macOS installer packages which are applications run from an existing macOS installation and are typically only used for upgrading.
@ddmiller Would you care to please share that checklist?
I’ve got one I use for Migration Assistant, but that mostly covers settings which sometimes aren’t migrated.
Thanks.
This isn’t the first time someone asked after I’ve mentioned it - I just never wanted to redact things.
I exported to PDF and tried to redact anything private, even if it’s not top-secret (machine names, Mac account names) but you should get the general idea. (Hopefully I did it right…) It’s pretty unique to my configuration. I’ve also left out some steps -I have two Mac minis that are there mostly there to serve media files for Sonos, and I left those steps out, since I’ve set them up many times, and, yes, they are set to autologin to a standard account, so obviously I left out the steps to create those accounts. I’ve also realized that I left out the steps to set up SpamSieve and the filtering drone custom rule on the Mac minis - I’d better document that, too. (On one of them it doesn’t run - I just have it set up in case something happens to the main Mac mini.)
I have a folder in iCloud Drive called “Install Files” that has probably old versions of install files for most of my non-App Store apps, and that’s referenced a few times.
The things crossed out are things I once did. I leave them there because I may go back to them someday.
Yes, I really have twelve email accounts (two of the fourteen are crossed out.) Four of them are accounts for an organization for which I’m the chair of the board of trustees, and the IT guy. Two of them are accounts for companies I consult for. Three of them I think I am going to consolidate to one account soon - they are for a personal domain I own.
Steps to install fresh on new Mac.pdf (199.7 KB)
Interesting list.
I better understand now how some people can suggest clean install over migration. I see you have less than a dozen entries dedicated to restoring system and app settings. I suspect if I tried to jot down all the settings I like to have for both macOS as well as my most used apps, it would easily span 300+ entries. And that’s before I even get into customizing dozens of window toolbars and sidebars to make them efficient for my use.
And hence I dread ever having to do a clean install. Even though I would be tempted to see just how much crud I could banish after having migrated across dozens of Macs for what by now must be almost 2 decades.
Now sure, I could attempt to copy over plist files instead of adjusting all those settings by hand. For some well-mannered apps that might work quite well actually.
For macOS I would be very skeptical though since I know from my own experience that it’s hard to nail down the exact file that truly contains the crucial parameters for a specific Finder detail — and that’s before we even get into plist vs. cfprefs.
If I had that all sorted out, I could finally get Finder to give me the default window I want. And yet, to this day, I still have to rely on scripting to get that done each and every time I Finder restarts (excruciatingly long story here and here and here and here and here).
I have one like that for Microsoft Office on Windows. It is crazy how hidden the settings can be. And how certain settings that apply to all Office apps can only be set in certain Office apps. And some settings only appear in certain contexts. And some settings only appear after you’ve changed other seemingly unrelated settings.
OK, perhaps I should clarify my question.
Given that Time Machine and any other tool that can simply back up files on the Data volume can only ever allow you to restore with Migration Assistant when quick restoration is desired, then why bother with a specialised cloning tool? What does Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper! or ChronoSync (my preference) get me that Time Machine doesn’t, for the use case of restoring your system from a complete backup?
Or to put it another way: it was always the conceit of CCC or SD users that Time Machine backups weren’t bootable. How about now?
Of course, any tool that backs up data in some form that can then later be used to restore data, in some capacity, is useful in some way and may be sufficient for you when quick restoration of the form provided by bootable backups or a quickly restorable system clone isn’t needed. Actually, although I am increasingly with @Simon in thinking that clean restoration is increasingly unviable, it has been my tendency in the past. But increasingly I find myself wanting migrations to simply work, and although the increasing complexity of macOS is making it harder and harder to pin down problems when they do happen, it often works well enough to save me time.
But, it does seem to me that these cloning tools are now basically vestigial. What are they good for?
I use Carbon Copy Cloner now (under the new macOS versions which don’t permit bootable backups) rather than Time Machine because it gives me more control over the backup process. Thanks to snapshots on both ends (snapshots of the backup and snapshots of the source disk), a CCC backup is quite similar to a Time Machine backup. However, with CCC, I can choose how often to perform backups. In my case, I do a backup each 3 hours, while Time Machine backs up hourly.
In addition, CCC performs a verification of the backup at intervals I choose. Periodically, it does a checksum comparison of the backup to the source disk to ensure that the backup files haven’t been corrupted.
So, while Time Machine is a great tool for connect it and forget it, CCC gives me more control over the backup process.
And as to why CCC over the others, it’s simply because I began using it after using SuperDuper! for a while, and CCC had solved some Apple-created problem before SuperDuper! did. I feel for both the developers of CCC and SuperDuper! Since I had CCC and was using it, I just kept using it.
First off, never assume that any piece of software is bug-free. So using two different apps may save your bacon if one glitches.
But if your only purpose is restoring a system, then I think the argument stops there, since you can configure multiple TM devices and you can swap them in/out in order to make archives.
On the other hand, that’s not the only use for a backup utility. For some examples:
~/Documents or ~/Music). And a disk-clone utility is more convenient and seems more reliable than doing a drag/drop copy from the Finder.These utilities don’t provide special features beyond what I could get from the Finder or by running rsync, but they’re really convenient and reliable, especially when copying a very large number of files.
And, of course, backup utilities that don’t make clones (e.g. Retrospect) often provide data compression, allowing you to pack more files onto destination media, or to store multiple complete backups on a single destination volume without using snapshots.
One reason I would like a bootable backup is a RAID drive I have that I run Disk Warrior on at times. I can only do that if the Startup is clean and nothing is accessing the drive. No matter what I do (including terminal commands), I am unable to unmount it. Booting from a minimal OS may help that.
Oh, this just gets me started with the critical things. I am always adding apps as I need them, tweaking settings, etc.
I also change the sidebar of the finder with folders and files I often use, but that’s not something I need to document, either.
Not a durn thing. 
But . . . using any one of them in addition to Time Machine gives you an added layer of protection. In this case because all three 3d party applications have been in use for a decade or more they are sturdy. Ditto for Retrospect and other enterprise backup systems. Two or more backup systems written by different people/companies are always safer than one.
And as @Shamino and others point out, CCC et. al. provide a wealth of specific backup options that are simply not possible in Time Machine. (Yes, Chronosync, please copy this directory of code that I’ve just updated and would hate losing the changes as soon as you see my little USB stick.)
–
You know? Having just migrated using Migration Assistant to a new Mini (gasp, 5 times faster than my old iMac) and deeply enjoying the fact that I’ve just had to put up with a modest blizzard of permissions dialogs and not much else. I’m plunking down hard on using Migration Assistant rather than a clean install. That said, having done clean installs for myself and nervous clients I can say that except in the case of serious server stuff a clean install without extensive preparation acts somewhat like going to a spa for several days of saunas and massages and time spent looking at trees. On your return, all those vitally important settings (that you’ve had in place for 20 years even though you can’t remember why you set them), don’t seem so vital and maybe just let them go.
YMMV
Dave
So, on a related note. I have now imported two users on to an M3 MacBook Air and have iDrive doing online backups. This means that my previous backups for those users are now redundant, including ones on a “bootable” external drive. Since this may be unusable, I am inclined to reformat the drive and use it just as an external SSD for backups. Should I do this, or are bootable backups likely to be supported again, at some point?
i have also confirmed that some of the previous advice about transitioning to a new Mac should be updated. For the M3 I only imported the User folders and have reinstalled all non-standard app, including Nisus Writer Pro. Since all the preferences and settings are stored in the User folder, it means that you do not have to re-enter serial numbers and other information to use them. They just pick up from when you last used them. So reinstalling apps is not a big hassle, and means you can streamline your new system as required.
Just because a backup is no longer bootable, does not mean it is useless. Take TM backups, they aren’t bootable and they still serve very well to restore an entire system via MA or to just get an older version of a single file. Same goes for SD or CCC “clones”.
Also, “redundant” backups are a good thing. You want multiple backups and you want them sourced from different tools too. Different storage locations is great too.
Unless you simply do not have any funds, I’d suggest keeping your old “bootable” backups (ideally stored away in a safe place) and instead buying a new drive for future backups instead of formatting and reusing the old.
I just thought of another important use-case. CCC (not sure about others) will let you configure a task to run scripts before/after a backup. For some, this can be very important.
For instance, if you’re running a database server, you don’t want to back up its files while the server is running, because the files may not contain the most recent transactions. With scripting, you can stop the server, make the backup, then restart the server.
Or (as I’ve seen recommended for some databases like MySQL), you can run a script to dump certain/all database tables to a large SQL script (which will re-create everything when executed), and then backup that script.
Being able to do other things as a part of a backup/restore (e.g. mount/unmount volumes, perform cryptographic validation of backed-up files) may also be important for some users/use-cases.
I pretty much gave up on them as well…although I do have one from Ventura (I think, whatever the M1 MBPs shipped with) for my laptop still…but after installing onto there I then cloned the Data volume from the MBP…but it’s no longer updated and I would hesitate to clone the Sonoma Data volume to it as there could be stuff in there that the older macOS might not like. I’m not even sure that it would boot on the Studio…never tried it. My guess is that unless the internal SSD failed a simple reinstall using Recovery mode and keeping the Data volume would be sufficient.
Ahh, I remember the early days backing up to floppy drives. The old BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users’ Group) recommendation was to do 3. Why? Well, if the first disk in failed, you’d assume it was the disk. When the second disk failed, you’d realize that it was the reader that was defective – but you still had that 3rd set. R.I.P. BMUG.
I’ve been using Get Backup Pro for backups of critical data to the cloud. It has an option of incremental back-ups so it will update only what has changed. Back before retirement I’d back up critical data daily. Now once a week for a few folders does the trick. That plus Time Machine and Chronosync for data only.
Time Machine = Yes
Backblaze = Yes
Data On External Drives = Yes. (A lot like I used to do with floppies on the Mac Plus with OS 4. I just drag new copies over after sorting by date.)
My M2 mini boots from an external SSD, and my backup strategy relied upon using Time Machine to back up the machine to an external HD, and then also a periodic backup using Time Machine to a Synology NAS. The NAS itself is configured as a 2-drive RAID array. My practice with all of the minis in my network has been to essentially ignore the small internal SSDs and run everything off the 4TB external SSDs. This has worked perfectly for several years now, and Time Machine happily backs up the machine to the external HD as well as to the NAS system.
Worked great, until I decided to disregard my own policy and “upgrade” the internal SSD in the M2 mini from macOS 14.7 to macOS 15.2, solely because I wanted to take a look at Apple Intelligence. I had tried to run AI on the external boot SSD where I had previously installed macOS 15.2, but I discovered that AI won’t run on an external drive, it can only run on an internal drive. Big disappointment. I went ahead then and installed 15.2 on the internal 500GB SSD.
That killed Time Machine’s backup routines when I was in the external SSD environment. There was nothing I could do to get Time Machine past the 98% completion point - Time Machine would then just quit, backups to anywhere would not finish if I had booted into macOS 15.2 on the external SSD. Time Machine would finish the backup under one condition only - I had to use the internal SSD as the Startup Drive. Not what I wanted.
User Barney-15E in the Apple Support Sequoia discussion group made the critical connection for me - exclude the Data Volume in the internal SSD - while configuring the options in Time Machine when booted into the external SSD. That did the trick, and now Time Machine is happily backing up the external SSD to the external HD and the very external NAS, even though the machine is running macOS 15.2 in the external SSD.
Now I can ignore the internal SSD the way I’ve always done; I even keep the internal drive deselected in the Finder Settings dialog so I never have to see it on the Desktop.
Aloha All:
What I find concerning are the reports that this issue also interferes with Time Machine backups and Synology (?SP) reports interference with backing up to their systems.
David Kerwood reports on this above.
Lonnie King
I’ve never liked Time Machine and refuse to use it. Carbon Copy Cloner works very well for me backing up my M1 MacBook Air – and although the backups made are not bootable, Migration Assistant can still pull over the data in case of disaster. Fast, portable SSDs are not all they are cracked up to be, either, as I’ve had 2 Samsung portable drives (2TB each) that have both eventually failed to mount on the desktop. They were not cheap.