I will never understand why Apple chose the path of not allowing bootable external clones. I’m sure if Apple chose to, they could make a very functional cloning tool to resolve the issues Ric experienced.
For decades our company has relied on clones for (what is essentially) instant recovery from catastrophic failure of disks. We’d simply boot from the clone and be working again in moments. We could move to a new machine, boot from the clone then clone back to the internal drive without the unreliable and agricultural Migration Assistant.
I’m starting to believe Ric has a very valid point. Don’t buy anything non-standard from Apple and keep data storage on the internal drive to a minimum so it can’t be ‘locked away’ by Apple.
To think you can be without a new machine for several weeks - with a real chance of complete data loss - is totally unacceptable.