Carbon Copy Cloner Big Sur Bootable

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  • Another problem with Big Sur is the cryptographically signed system volume. This was designed as a security mechanism, but in daily use it means that your Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup must be erased each and every time the operating system is updated – a problem Apple introduced in Big Sur.
  • Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1.23. Bombich Software. We posted CCC 5.1.23 yesterday which includes support for making bootable backups on Intel Macs running Big Sur. CCC runs natively on & is fully compatible with Apple Silicon Macs, but we’re still tracking some macOS issues here.
  • Make a complete backup onto the external of your Mac’s boot drive using Carbon Copy Cloner Boot your Mac into Recovery Mode Erase your Mac’s boot drive Reinstall macOS Big Sur and boot into it.

@bombich has now posted a lengthy article explaining that CCC 5.1.22 is now officially qualified for macOS 11 Big Sur. That doesn’t mean it will make bootable duplicates on its own—Apple’s Apple System Restore tool isn’t functioning sufficiently for that to be true—but you can install macOS onto a CCC backup to make it bootable and end up in the same place. Today’s tip is Carbon Copy Cloner, a free app (donations accepted) that creates a bootable backup copy of your disk. Update 2012: Carbon Copy Cloner is no longer free. But it’s better then ever, an excellent backup solution that saves a lot of time and headaches. How it’s different from a Time Machine backup.

In a previous post I mentioned I was trying out the Big Sur beta. This was actually on my iMac with a fusion drive that I wasn’t using for much else, but now that I had Big Sur on it I started using it more and the slowness of the fusion drive started getting on to me. It’s been a while since I used regular drives, and while the fusion drive is supposed to be better than regular drives due to the 32GB (in my case) of SSD caching it provides I hated it. Any other time I wouldn’t have purchased an iMac with a fusion drive, but I bought this iMac at a time when I wanted something urgently and if I switched the fusion drive to an SSD it added a couple of days to the delivery times and so I skipped it.

Anyways, fast forward and now I have Big Sur on it and it was slow as hell and irritating. Then I read somewhere that one can boot macOS from an external drive. In fact that’s how sensible people tried out their beta versions – not by installing it on their primary partition like I had done. :) So I decided to go down that route. I could have got an SSD but I went ahead and bought a 2TB NVMe drive and an USB-C to NVMe enclosure – which on paper is expensive, and it really is mind you, but is still cheaper than buying something like the Samsung X5 of a similar capacity (the price difference being due to the fact that the X5 has Thunderbolt to NVMe and so you get 40Gbps bandwidth whereas the UBC-C one I went for gives me 10Gbps – which was fine in my case, I don’t need 40Gbps, and I couldn’t find any Thunderbolt to NVMe enclosures either).

First I thought I’d try something like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the internal drive to the NVMe. That didn’t work coz CCC doesn’t work with Big Sur yet and gives a warning that the destination drive won’t be bootable (it does so even before I select a destination drive). I tried to clone and boot anyways and it didn’t work as expected. So what I did instead was the following:

  1. I erased the NVMe disk as APFS via Disk Utility.
  2. Then I took a Time Machine backup the installed macOS.
  3. Rebooted and went into recovery mode (press Cmd-R while rebooting).
  4. Tried to do a restore of the Time Machine back to the NVMe but it said I must reinstall macOS first. It gives an option to do so there itself, which I did. (Or you could choose to reinstall from the initial menu itself. (Here’s the Apple document to recovery mode for some pictures). Either ways, this will install Big Sur to the disk you specify.
  5. While booting up into this newly installed OS (it does automatically after the install) I was asked if I want to migrate from a Time Machine backup. I selected to do so, pointed it to my previously created backup, and it restored everything.
  6. Rebooted, and I was now booting Big Sur from the NVMe disk (speedy!!) and all my data and settings were there.

Some things actually worked better after this. Previously in Big Sur I wasn’t able to get the default colourful wallpaper working as it would bring up the Catalina wallpaper instead. On the new install that works fine. Some apps like Witch and Alfred etc. bring up their permissions dialog again on first login – no big deal. And that’s it really. But boy, macOS runs so blazingly fast now. Every task which used to take a minute or two of me staring at the beach ball previously is now instant. Nice!

Update: Note to self. When rebooting the Mac press the Option key so I am asked which drive to boot from. The NVMe (or any external) disk can sometimes take a while before being recognised and in such case the Mac boots to the fusion drive by default. Also, press Ctrl when selecting the NVMe so it remembers that as the default (not that it matters because I should always press the Option key when rebooting).

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CCC 5.1.23+ can make bootable backups of Big Sur on Intel-based Macs.

Update Nov 24:CCC 5.1.23 can now make bootable backups of a Big Sur startup disk on Intel-based Macs. Support for System volume cloning on Apple Silicon Macs is disabled for now because Apple's APFS replication utility does not currently work on that platform. When Apple fixes that, we'll post an update to CCC that restores support for making bootable backups on Apple Silicon Macs.

CCC is a native application on Apple Silicon and is 100% compatible with Apple Silicon Macs
CCC will automatically proceed with a Data Volume backup when backing up an APFS Volume Group on Apple Silicon Macs — that's a complete backup of your data, applications, and system settings. If you would like to make your Apple Silicon Mac backup bootable, you can install Big Sur onto the CCC Data Volume backup. Please keep in mind, however, that your CCC backup does not have to be bootable for you to be able to restore data from it.

With the announcement of macOS Big Sur, Apple has retired Mac OS X (10) and replaced it with macOS 11. As with every upgrade since the original release of Mac OS X, we have to make changes to CCC to accommodate the changes in this new OS. As the numeric change would suggest, though, this is the biggest change to macOS since Apple introduced Mac OS X roughly 20 years ago. The system now resides on a 'Signed System Volume'. This volume is cryptographically sealed, and that seal can only be applied by Apple; ordinary copies of the System volume are non-bootable without Apple's seal. To create a functional copy of the macOS 11 System volume, we have to use an Apple tool to copy the system, or install macOS onto the backup.

Does this mean that we can no longer have bootable backups?

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I can certainly understand why people are concerned about the future of this solution. Thanks to these massive system changes and some bugs in the version of Big Sur that Apple intends to ship, nobody can make a proper copy of the System volume right now, not even with Apple's proprietary utilities. Based on that statement alone, and a suggestion from one of my competitors to just give up and use Time Machine instead (which does not make bootable backups, nor back up the System), someone could falsely conclude that it's impossible to have a bootable backup.

I think that pessimistic conclusions are also fostered by a concern that Apple is trying to turn macOS into iOS, or otherwise merge the two platforms. On top of that we're in the midst of a pandemic, and one would hope that Apple would cool their jets and defer these massive changes for a year. But no, we're not just getting a massive new OS this year, we're getting a new hardware platform too! We're seeing a lot of change at a time where we could really use some stability.

The changes in Big Sur definitely present some new logistical challenges, butyes, you can have a bootable backup of macOS Big Sur. Right now you can install Big Sur onto your CCC backup to make it bootable, and in the future we'll use Apple's APFS replication utility (ASR) to clone the Big Sur System volume. Apple has assured us that they are working towards fixing the problems in ASR that prevent it from cloning the Big Sur System volume.

Carbon Copy Cloner Big Sur Bootable Hard Drive

Does my CCC backup have to be bootable for me to restore data from it?

No. Bootability is a convenience that allows you to continue working if your startup disk fails, but it is not required for restoring data from a CCC backup. You can restore individual folders and older versions of files (i.e. from snapshots) using CCC while booted from your production startup disk. CCC backups are also compatible with Migration Assistant, so you can use Migration Assistant to restore all of your data to a clean installation of macOS (e.g. on a replacement disk).

Here's why I'm really stoked about this new, 'proprietary' macOS, and optimistic about the future of bootable backups

Every year we spend hundreds of hours making changes to CCC to accommodate the new OS. Every year. CCC isn't like other apps that can easily roll with the changes; our solution is tied so closely to the logistics of the startup process, and that happens to be something that Apple has been changing a lot since the introduction of APFS. The logic changes required to accommodate APFS volume groups alone are mind blowing. All of that time spent is subtracted from the time we can spend on feature work. To put it plainly, we spend about a quarter to half of our year just making CCC work with the next year's OS. That's not a shiny new feature that users can swoon about (and pay for!), it's typically thankless work, and – fair or not – work that users have come to expect us to provide for free.

What if we didn't have to take the responsibility of making the startup logistics work on the backup disk? What if Apple provided that part of the solution? What if all we had to do was make the best backup of your data, apps and system settings, and then let Apple handle the logistics of the System? We'd be dreaming, right?

In fact, Apple has been making key parts of the startup process proprietary for years, but they've also been developing functionality within macOS that handles the proprietary parts. All the way back to the beginning of Mac OS X, in fact, we'll start with the 'bless' utility, which makes changes to the volume headers to make a volume bootable. We've been using bless for 20 years! Over that time bless has been adapted to the changing OS and hardware landscape, because Apple uses it too. With the introduction of APFS, we've had to leverage more Apple utilities; primarily diskutil, a command-line version of Disk Utility. We really started leaning on diskutil in Catalina for the manipulation of APFS volume groups. Finally, in macOS 10.15.5 we got the 'opportunity' to field test another Apple utility that has lurked in macOS since Mac OS 9: Apple Software Restore (ASR). ASR is a utility that Apple has used in factories to 'stamp' the system image onto every Mac, and more than a decade ago I developed a mass deployment solution around that utility. Like with the bless utility, Apple has been adapting ASR for APFS, and Apple is going to make ASR work with Big Sur too.

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In the near future, I expect to be able to leverage ASR within CCC (again) to clone the Big Sur System volume, and then use our own file copier for maintaining backups of the data that actually matters – your data, applications, and system settings. That would create the perfect division of responsibility: Apple is responsible for the copying of its proprietary OS, and CCC is responsible for the backup of your data. All of this, though, will be neatly wrapped in the Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup solution.

We need to share our concerns productively with Apple

It's easy to complain about how things don't work the way they used to (go ahead and get me started on Big Sur's new alert dialogs and progress indicators!). Rather than complaining, or giving up, though, we need to make it clear to Apple that we want these solutions, and we need to make it clear when they don't work. Evernote tags best practice. We can do that with bug reports, and to that end, we've been very transparent about our bug reports to Apple on issues within macOS that affect CCC, e.g.:

But we can also send a clear message to Apple with our choices. If Apple ships macOS Big Sur without fixing the underlying utilities that facilitate creating a bootable backup, you can choose to defer the upgrade. There is no urgency, no impetus to upgrade to macOS Big Sur. If we defer the upgrade choice, that sends a clear message that we're willing to wait for Apple to deliver quality software, rather than hitting an artificial deadline with an OS that's not ready.

Carbon Copy Cloner Big Sur Bootable Flash Drive

In the meantime, if you're an early adopter by choice or by profession, you can still make your CCC backups bootable. CCC will automatically handle the logistics of making a complete backup of all of your data, applications and system settings. Once you have that, simply install Big Sur onto your backup to make it bootable. Again, we're planning to automate that part of the procedure in the future, but we've tested this scenario extensively and we're prepared to support it.

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CCC 5.1.22 is qualified for use on macOS Big Sur, and this update is free for all current CCC v5 license holders. We have some additional resources that folks should check out as well as they consider the Big Sur upgrade: