I have a specific reason to ensure I have a bootable SSD backup, apart from the obvious. I have a beautiful late 2014 27" 5k iMac. I know that SSDs have a limited life, and the internal 500GB SSD is now over 6 years old. I have been getting the occasional odd behaviour and therefore I have numerous backups scheduled daily via CCC. However, the internal SSD is going to fail someday, and is probably not financially worth trying to get it replaced. But the 5k 27" screen is still magnificent! So I will be able to use my Samsung T5 SSD as my primary drive and keep all my systems and the iMac screen running normally!
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I also use a Samsung T5 as my backup SSD drive, very satisfied with its performance and dependability.
If we needed another reason to have bootable backups, Apple just gave us one: the M1 Mac (and perhaps software-related, too) write issue - Appleās SSDsā lifespan seriously degraded, and may crap out in just a couple of years. A big problem in itself, itās even bigger in the light of the fact that SSD drives on most new Macs are not user-serviceable and cost hundreds of dollars to replace.
Again, whatās happening at Apple? āIt just worksā has become a cynical ālegacyā joke, and has been supplanted by āJust live with itā. Appleās software developers/coders have become lazy and sloppy. The hardware people, especially on the Mac side, seem to be more interested in outside āthinā than in inside quality and making (keeping) Macs which are easily useful. Quality control? Forget it! Appleās focus on Services, especially iOS and iDevice-related stuff wouldnāt be bad, but that seems to have largely replaced any focus on the quality and usability of their real computers. And altogether, the futureās in the Cloud, no longer in usersā hands. And, as we all know, the Cloud is wholly secure, wholly stable, wholly reliable, and wholly available all the time, all over the world, and even beyond. Isnāt it? Trust us.
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One additional advantage of bootable backups is that they are quick and easy to verify - you just need to plug in the drive and see whether you can boot up from it. If you can, the chances are that the backup is good.
Verifying backups is a really important task - Iām sure that weāve all got horror stories where we assumed that backups were good when they werenāt! - and bootable backups make this task much easier than with ādata-onlyā backups.
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We should be a little careful about this. People are using third party SMART utilities to report this issue and we donāt know for sure if the smart statistics reported by the drive are real numbers or not. The drive makers are not required to report any real numbers, or the numbers could be bits rather than bytes. Apple doesnāt have to tell what the numbers mean - the smart utility tries to discern based on what they see.
It could be right and Apple will need to fix the problem. But itās also possible that the system is not writing terabytes of data daily and the numbers seen by the utilities are not what they think they are.
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Youāre right, we need to be careful not to judge Apple until enough reliable data has been gathered. However, the reports Iāve seen (Googled) come from people who seem to be expert users. I believe it behooves Apple to clear this up. I donāt know for sure, but it seems the problem was only discovered a few weeks ago, maybe too early for Apple themselves to know for sure, but it seems that they ought to come up with something, and say something publicly, soon. The ballās now in their court.
But Iād take issue with one thing you say: āApple doesnāt have to tell what the numbers mean - the smart utility tries to discern based on what they see.ā On my 2020 Intel MBAir Mac (and probably all other Macs, too) I can see what Appleās own utility reports, in my case āSMART Status: verifiedā, and there are no numbers at all. Wouldnāt/shouldnāt it give information about how much storage is used, or left, and, given how long the Mac has been in use, be able to give at least a ballpark estimate of how much longer the SSD will still be useful? āVerifiedā has to mean more than just āthe Macās heart is still pumpingā; every doctor in an ICU needs to know much more than just that.
The SMART monitoring system does not specify requirements for what the numbers reported actually mean. All that they are supposed to do is report drive health information to host systems so that they can warn users when the drive may be about to fail.
I believe that all drive manufacturers do not publish what the numbers mean - itās not just Apple. People who monitor the drives then guess at what the drive SMART status is reporting. Itās possible (probably?) in this case that the numbers that were discerned from Appleās SSD on Intel systems are different for the M1 systems. As I said before, perhaps on Intel systems they were reporting raw values in bytes, and now they are reporting in bits for some reason. It could be that there are errors in the SMART attributes for the drives as well, and they are over-recording on the attributes that are attributed to raw drive write totals.
See Smart - Wikipedia. for more information. Specifically:
As manufacturers do not necessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and measurement units, the following list of attributes is a general guide only.
I love my bootable backup. It allows me to quickly try out things without worry that I will break my system and need hours to rebuild the system.
I also use it to quickly build new machines. (I am tech support for several members of my family.) Instead of installing all of my favorite applications over and over. I just boot the new machine from my backup and clone it to the internal drive. Then I create a new user and everything works. I just did this for 2 new Macs back in December.
I will be sticking with Catalina for a long as I can.
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I decided to use a 2 drive strategy. Since the Samsung T5 is only 2 x 3 x 1/2 in inches and weighs only 2 ounces, 2 of those are smaller and lighter than any external 2.5ā HDD. Install Big Sur on one. Doesnāt have to be large, just enough to to fit the OS. Migrate just your login settings. Boot from that if needed. Do a data-only backup on the second. Mount that and your most-recent data will be present. Of course that wonāt work on the 1-port MacBook, and on an MBA you would need a hub if you need any additional dongles, but if the recovery partition is also damaged, that gets you running. And given this is an emergency situation, a bit of inconvenience is acceptable.
Having owned Macs forever, and suffered many failures, I can say that the number of times I used a bootable clone to continue working were very few.
For two reasons:: first, often the Mac that took a dump did so because of a problem that rendered it impossible to boot from ANYTHING (think power, display, logic board). And second, I usually had a laptop. And while not a clone per se, it worked instantly with no boot-from-external penalty, and its use meant I could take the broken Mac out of service and/or attempt to repair it.
About the only use for clones I have now is system testingā¦and given Appleās record of late, perhaps thatās even more important than backup, since updating is so often a self-inflicted wound these days.
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I have long used both a bootable backup and a Time Machine backup for my desktop macs, and I am not happy with loosing that option. The bootable backups have been faster for restoration when needed; Time Machine can be painfully slow for a whole disk restore.
Another important feature of bootable backups ā at least for me ā has been the option of upgrading memory simply and easily by making a bootable backup on a larger external hard drive. Iāve done it on a series of Macs, most recently stretching the lifetime of a Mini a few years by running off a Firewire external drive.
Having run into problems with accidental deletion of files, I donāt trust using iCloud for backup. Maybe I should take a look at it again, but I now only move copies of files onto iCloud when I need access from both desktop and laptop.
The most logical way forward to Big Sur seems to be separating data from apps on separate drives, but that looks like it could be messy if some apps donāt store all their data in user folders. Thatās something I havenāt investigated yet, so Iām sticking with Mojave for now.
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Sure, and thereās nothing new here. If youāre going into a situation of highly constrained supply, you have to bring your own backups based on an evaluation of the risk and what you can afford.
But do note that I didnāt say that bootable duplicates were impossible, just that they require some futzing around in Carbon Copy Cloner and ChronoSync right now. Apple says it plans to fix asr, and thereās every reason to believe the situation will only get better. My point is that for most people, most of the time, a bootable duplicate is simply not a necessity like it once was. You arenāt in that group.
No, I havenāt traveled the past year. :-) But if the state of Texas is going to lose power and heat, the lack of cloud access to data is low on the list of most peopleās worries.
Itās easy to come up with examplesāeither locations or eventsāwhere access to the cloud is slow or spotty, but the fact is that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the world have reliable Internet access the vast majority of the time. If they didnāt, cloud access to data wouldnāt be as popular as it is.
And nothing is preventing you from making those backups or migrating your dataāthose are built-in features direct from Apple. If you donāt trust Apple overall, however, youāre just out of luck and will need to switch to a different platform.
I think itās an exaggeration to say that Apple has ākilled offā anything. What we know as iCloud today started as iTools and was renamed to MobileMe before becoming iCloud. Itās a pretty direct path apart from the names. I also donāt know what youāre referring to about Appleās supposedly abysmal track record with online storageāperhaps you can cite some specifics to support the point.
Thatās what Setup Assistant/Migration Assistant are designed to do for you. Not that your approach is necessarily wrong (although there have been times in the past when it was not a good idea or even possible to use one Macās drive to boot another), just that itās not necessary.
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This to me is deflection, not an argument. McDonalds is popular with hundreds of millions of customers. Itās still without doubt that they donāt make a serious quality hamburger. And thatās irrespective of how many billions of burgers McD has managed to sell. Plenty of people who value quality burgers will never go there. And those people are perfectly justified in saying, I want my fancy burger place so stay out of my face with your McD garbage.
iCloud is fine for those that like it. Yay for them. But thereās plenty of examples where itās not up to snuff, at least for some Mac users. And those people are perfectly justified in calling for alternatives. When they arenāt satisfied with those alternatives or their working alternatives are broken, pointing them to iCloud is simply useless.
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Iām not arguing for iCloud in particular. Iām arguing for Internet access in general. For hundreds of millions or billions of people, a computer/phone/tablet is useful only if itās connected to the Internet. Thereās no McDonalds analogy thereāit truly is useful and the mere fact that weāre having this discussion in the cloud is a tiny bit of evidence of that.
So yes, you can come up with examples where access to cloud data, whether thatās iCloud or something else, isnāt possible. But thereās absolutely no reason to assume that either Internet access in general or iCloud in particular is a scarce resource thatās likely to disappear at a momentās notice.
I fail to recognize a point. This is not about internet access making Macs useful. Nobody ever doubted that. This here is a discussion about bootable clones and their use. In light of such cloning being broken or taken away but then claiming, āthereās iCloud for backupsā (which is actually quite nonsensical considering iOS-style iCloud backup does not even exist for macOS) is just really quite irrelevant.
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I donāt like the fact that Apple is making it harder for us to reset or rebuild our systems.
While the need for an immediately available bootable backup may have decreased, since many people in their productive lives now have a desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone - and use some kind of cloud storage to backup their important files - so that they can switch to another system in a pinch, should the need arise; the convenience of a bootable second drive is still there, swap, done.
I have an old habit of having drive partitions, multiple drives, separating daily space and archive space, having a secondary boot option, ā¦ which has become harder and less elegant to do because, certainly when it comes to Mac minis for instance, we canāt put a second drive inside any more and/or drive docks are a fading breed, ā¦ But, in a pinch, with a boot cd or flash drive, one could be up and running in no time flat ( 30 min back in the days where OS X was a lot leaner ).
Clean install on a Mac > 10 years old, original disc or later OS disc. Easy peasy.
Macs that are a few years old, it would seem they need to phone home and/or may need a net install. A number of weeks ago, my prior Mac mini would not clean install from an external drive. I forgot what hoop I had to jump through to move forward.
Clean installing Big Sur on a mint M1 MBA?
Talk about a giant set of hurdles and time waster. Any instruction that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with to get boot options on a PowerMac or Intel. No dice. Ok, things have changed. Following Appleās sparse KBs when it comes to M1, logged out of iCloud, rebooted, held power button, picked the recovery option, into disk utility, erase, then hop back to re-install ā¦
" No users available for authorization ā¦ ensure that some user is allowed to administer this computer. " [ Quit ]
I literally could not believe my eyes!!!
Of course Apple has no instruction set for this anomaly that actually solves the problem. Sigh. I was > < this close to just boxing it up and mailing it back. With trial and error, lots of googling with next to no helpful results, various terminal things are suggested ā¦ managed to get it going after removing every single thing on the entire drive space and some other thing.
Hopefully Apple will get on top of things like this, because you should be able to prove that you are the rightful owner to the recovery system; and should not have to wipe all volumes on a system to get a reinstall happening.
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More specifically, SMART reports an array of numeric values representing the current state of the device and a corresponding array of āthresholdā values which indicate that the device has failed if a value crosses its threshold.
Although there is some consensus among manufacturers for the meaning of the more common values, the actual meanings are entirely up to the device manufacturer. Anything is legal as long as the corresponding threshold value is appropriate for it.
In other words, SMART is designed to report when a device has failed, not when it is likely to fail.
Various SMART monitoring utilities attempt to predict impending failure by interpreting the below-threshold values based on manufacturerās published documentation and experience with devices. These predictions will vary in accuracy depending on the design of the device and the design of the software making the predictions.
When a completely new kind of device (like the SSD used by an M1) comes around, this kind of software may or may not be a reliable measure of device health. It will take time and experience (and data sheets, if Apple would ever release them) to be able to do this. Right now, people are making assumptions based on more traditional kinds of SSDs (e.g. SATA and NVMe).
But all that being said, even under the best of situations, SMART status may not be all that useful. Iāve seen drives where SMART values indicate failure, that have continued to run for several years. Iāve also seen drives where SMART reported everything to be OK right up to the moment of a catastrophic failure.
In other words, itās just another indicator you should use in combination with many other factors (including usage and age) to determine if a storage device should be retained or replaced. I wouldnāt assume that a good SMART report means the drive is working perfectly, nor would I assume that a bad SMART report means imminent failure (although it may be enough warning for me to go order a replacement drive).
And, of course, some SMART values are much more meaningful than others with respect to predicting longevity. Here are some articles on the subject that you might find of interest:
They havenāt killed off the general concept of cloud services, but the devil is in the details. Using the Wikipedia page as a reference:
- Find My iPhone is still around, although it has changed quite a bit over the years and can now find all kinds of Apple equipment and users.
- Storage has always existed, but the MobileMe system did not migrate to iCloud. Users were told that they had to download all their gallery photos, iDisk files and iWeb sites before the shutdown. Nothing was migrated to iCloud storage.
- Address book and calendar still exists. Iām not sure if data was migrated, however.
- MobileMe Gallery is pretty much gone. Photo Stream and iCloud Photos are not really a replacement. And when Mobil Me shut down, userās content was not migrated to the new system.
- iDisk was shut down, forcing users to copy their data elsewhere. It was not automatically migrated to iCloud Drive, which came out later.
- iWeb Publish is gone. No replacement whatosever.
- iChat/AIM is gone. Of course, so is AIM. One might argue that the Messages app is its replacement, but that canāt communicate with non-Apple devices.
- Mail is still around, although the domains have changed.
In general, Appleās record with respect to cloud services has been spotty at best. While they might be convenient, I would never consider relying on them for anything mission-critical, just in case a service I need should go the way of iWeb.
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Regarding the need to phone home and/or net install, I sometimes think Apple thinks the entire world is in Cupertino with ultra-high-speed WiFi constantly available and willing to pay for such service so their solutions are all based on the assumption of constant high-speed Internet connectivity. There are still Internet dead spots in the world. While not directly related to this topic, I have never switched to streaming music because far too much of my music listening was done in situations without reliable or even any (e.g. airplanes) Internet service.
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I took a look back at our coverage from 2011.
The main thing thatās relevant here, I think, is iDisk, and yes, Apple did just shut that down and tell people to move files off, since iCloud Drive didnāt come out for quite a bit longer.
However, users were give a full year of notice, so itās not like anything mission-critical was impacted without plenty of time to move to the likes of Dropbox.
And itās also relevant to note that iCloud has been around for nearly 10 years now. Especially considering how deeply itās integrated into iOS and macOS, itās really not going away anytime soon.
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Indeed it is irrelevant! I was responding to the suggestion that the problems in Texas are not a good example of something to build into a backup strategyāI never said iCloud was good for backups. And in the article, I was clear to distinguish between iCloud Photos (an online version) and Backblaze (a real backup), while acknowledging that many people feel iCloud Photos is a sufficient backup of their photos such that theyād be less interested in having a duplicate on top of a Time Machine backup.
People seem to be reading all sorts of things into this article that were not in the text. Iām not saying bootable duplicates arenāt a good thing, and I didnāt say that theyāre impossible in Big Sur. What I did say is that the added complexity of making them in Big Sur right now (which comes down to a one-time step of installing Big Sur separately before or after making the data-only backup), when combined with the ready availability of extra backup devices and the general move toward cloud-based services, points out that bootable duplicates are not nearly the necessity they were years ago.
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