APFS Bug in macOS 10.15.5 Catalina Impacts the Creation of Bootable Backups

[PinkyMacGodess]

Good grief!!! Can't they get things right the first time? This won't effect a ton of people, but wow...

So, I'm thinking of waiting 2 weeks before updating any Apple OS. How many are thinking/doing likewise?

 

[edubfromktown]

why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

Ummm, heck no!

I've been creating new cloud-based workloads and migrating existing on premise servers/systems to "the cloud" since 2007 at work.

If you have the income stream to pay Apple to backup to the cloud plus purchase software subscriptions with others and pay every month in perpetuity, go for it. At home, I'm still running perpetual licensed products and only use local storage to backup my systems (along with running a number of Docker virtual hosts on Raspberry Pi 3 & 4 hardware). 5TB of reasonably fast hybrid (flash and spinning HD) external storage can be had for ~$100.00 or so.

Cloud apps and storage are no panacea. Adobe clobbered themselves and everyone who uses Creative Cloud quite nicely yesterday.

 

[citysnaps]

Good grief!!! Can't they get things right the first time? This won't effect a ton of people, but wow...

So, I'm thinking of waiting 2 weeks before updating any Apple OS. How many are thinking/doing likewise?

Seriously? With 100% perfection? No. Neither can any other OS developer.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I also have to say Windows feels very solid now. At least from my testing. So it's not what it used to be anymore.

Yet it's still quirky. I have a Windows 10 system that refuses to update to maintain supportability. It goes throught he update process over and over and always fails. I spent nearly an entire day tracking down the crumbs in the logs, and 'fixed' everything appropriate, and it STILL won't install the update. Windows 10 also has a hard time 'seeing' printers on the network. There is one that it just won't connect to, yet a different system had no problems. *shrug*

It's gotten better, but there are still a lot of 'mental issues' that popup from time to time.

I had a Windows 7 Enterprise system that also just stopped updating. After spending time holding its hand, I wiped it and installed Solaris.

 

[cmaier]

so outside of people trying to steal Apple IP to load newer MacOS versions on older systems or create hack-instoshes it must be a very small community of people that's affected by this.

it affects anyone trying to make bootable backups to protect against machine failures, which is actually something that anyone who relies on their machine to make a living should be doing.

 

[edubfromktown]

The other item to note is that some USB-3 external drives do not play nice for booting externally. I learned this last month while attempting to get a Catalina backup booted externally. Mike Bombich posted a separate article about that issue.

Shameless plug:

Kudos to Mike and his company! Carbon Copy Cloner is an awesome product that I have relied upon for many years. (I'm not affiliated in any way so no flames please...).

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Ummm, heck no!

I've been creating new cloud-based workloads and migrating existing on premise servers/systems to "the cloud" since 2007 at work.

If you have the income stream to pay Apple to backup to the cloud plus purchase software subscriptions with others and pay every month in perpetuity, go for it. At home, I'm still running perpetual licensed products and only use local storage to backup my systems (along with running a number of Docker virtual hosts on Raspberry Pi 3 & 4 hardware). 5TB of reasonably fast hybrid (flash and spinning HD) external storage can be had for ~$100.00 or so.

Cloud apps and storage are no panacea. Adobe clobbered themselves and everyone who uses Creative Cloud quite nicely yesterday.

Yeah, a client we had was sold on their vertical app's 'New cloud based support'. They were sold the idea that putting everything in the cloud would 'solve all of their IT problems'. Ans also not have to employ IT support people locally. We had a meeting, which was nice. They laid it on the table and asked my opinion. I could tell they were sold, so I just said 'give it a try, but be prepared for issues'. One person scoffed at my comment.

They swung to the cloud system. There were some 'hiccups' getting their data uploaded. Then, a couple of weeks later, someone with a backhoe hit the buried line feeding that area. They also hit gas and water lines too as I remember. I get the call: 'Help! We don't have any internet access! How can we get back to work? This is costing us thousands of dollars!' I called their ISP, and was told the fix could take more than a week. The client was on the end of a residential line, and the mess created by all the utilities cut made fixing it having to wait for the other repairs. I suggested moving their server to someone's home, or to a customer of theirs. What they chose to do was send their people home, and work on the cloud software there, having people running paperwork to them. Then, after the internet came back up, they went back to their own server based system. Being right feels good sometimes.

Yeah, the cloud isn't the 'best' solution. (Who was it that was caught not backing up their cloud clients data after one of their drives failed. Yikes. I'd much rather be in charge of my own data)

 

[saudor]

Either you have no clue what you're doing, or are working with junk hardware as Windows 10 is extremely stable. Believe me, I'm also an IT for almost 20 years, and Windows 10 is really very stable. My clients rarely have Windows 10 issues (cannot blame MS or Windows for 3rd party app issues). As a matter of fact, I had a client that was a mix of Windows and macOS and BY FAR we had more issues with the Mac users than the Windows users. BY FAR.

This. There was a point where win10 sucked big time but it's actually stable and generally runs the apps faster because of software features (e.g. CUDA) that pull it ahead in various apps. You just gotta tweak some of the telemetry stuff but then again, whenever i do a macOS clean install, i also have a script of about 30 lines to tweak macOS to my liking.

 

[VanNess]

“Suffice it to say, though, I'm extremely disappointed that Apple would introduce this kind of bug in a dot-release OS update. We've seen 5 major updates to Catalina now, we should expect to see higher quality than this from an operating system.”

You said it buddy.

When I purchased my late 2015 iMac with El Capitan pre-installed, it worked wonderfully right out of the box...until the 10.11.3 update which suddenly caused the machine to spontaneously restart pretty much everyday whether it was being used or not. Every subsequent update had no impact on the bug until the release of Sierra which like magic suddenly resolved the issue. Not a single spontaneous restart after Sierra (and all of it’s subsequent updates) was installed. But it was a long long unpleasant wait...

Sierra remains on my machine because every subsequent macOS release from High Sierra to current has created issues not present in Sierra and I’ve tried them all. Nothing as serious as the spontaneous restart issue and maybe things a lot of people wouldn’t notice, but nonetheless a steady accumulation of things that we’re regressions. But the bottom line is I have no interest in having my machine operate in a way that is less than the way it operated when I first purchased it and that’s been the case up to and including the current macOS release.

 

[ericwn]

so outside of people trying to steal Apple IP to load newer MacOS versions on older systems or create hack-instoshes it must be a very small community of people that's affected by this.

Not sure I follow your logic. Are you suggesting that anybody attempting to make a bootable backup does it with the intention to steal Apple’s IP?

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

“Suffice it to say, though, I'm extremely disappointed that Apple would introduce this kind of bug in a dot-release OS update. We've seen 5 major updates to Catalina now, we should expect to see higher quality than this from an operating system.”

You said it buddy.

When I purchased my late 2015 iMac with El Capitan pre-installed, it worked wonderfully right out of the box...until the 10.11.3 update which suddenly caused the machine to spontaneously restart pretty much everyday whether it was being used or not. Every subsequent update had no impact on the bug until the release of Sierra which like magic suddenly resolved the issue. Not a single spontaneous restart after Sierra (and all of it’s subsequent updates) was installed. But it was a long long unpleasant wait...

Sierra remains on my machine because every subsequent macOS release from High Sierra to current has created issues not present in Sierra and I’ve tried them all. Nothing as serious as the spontaneous restart issue and maybe things a lot of people wouldn’t notice, but nonetheless a steady accumulation of things that we’re regressions. But the bottom line is I have no interest in having my machine operate in a way that is less than the way it operated when I first purchased it and that’s been the case up to and including the current macOS release.

I hear you.

Anyone remember the 'good old days' of Windows? When updates killed the updates from previous updates? When features would be hammered by updates, only to be enabled in a new update and hammered again in another update. Yippee...
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Not sure I follow your logic. Are you suggesting that anybody attempting to make a bootable backup does it with the intention to steal Apple’s IP?

I've done this several times, and I'm not 'stealing', or creating a Frankenstein 'fake Mac'. Good grief...

 

[sakagura]

Not sure I follow your logic. Are you suggesting that anybody attempting to make a bootable backup does it with the intention to steal Apple’s IP?

I think he's trying to say that the hackintosh systems are made by modifying a cloned disk. It can be done that way but that's not the only way. The macOS installer is the normal method.

So there's no excuse for this clone bug to exist. We have been able to make clone back ups since the early days of classic Mac OS. I miss the days when I could just copy the system folder to another disk and that's done. Perfect back up with just a drag and drop.

 

[ericwn]

why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

Have you tried booting a Mac from your cloud backup?

 

[smaffei]

why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

I love these non-answer answers.
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Ok, so an error flag wasn’t set properly.

This reminds me of an old saying, “Sometimes even the monkey falls out of the tree.”

Fix it and move on.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know a thing about the problem.

 

[MilaM]

So a system call to the kernel fails to creat new firmlinks and does not report an error. Could it be that the bug will in some way affect calls to this API by macOS system software? Maybe upgrades from Mojave to Catalina?

 

[Babygotfont]

I love mike's CCC ... 3 thumbs up!

 

[Jyby]

Science Rules!

 

[Madhatter32]

why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

I hope this is sarcasm. If you are relying on the cloud for backups you do not run a business or rely on mission critical data.

 

[longofest]

why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

Speed.

I back up locally and using BackBlaze. I once had a total machine failure of an iMac, and when I went to go restore my local backup, I looked in horror as I saw that it hadn't actually backed up for months. So, I went to backblaze and had them ship a drive to me.

If my local drive had worked, I could have been back up and running that day. As it was, it took around a week to get fully back to normal. I thank god that I had the backup in backblaze, but still wish I had the local backup.

 

[Shirasaki]

Ok, so a few takeaways here.
1. Is it considered illegal to not use first party Apple software nowadays? What? It’s not like time machine has a ton of options or something. Also ransomware targets time machine backup. What about that?

2. Catalina is truely a disaster. Thankfully I still use high Sierra. I know, two years old. But aside from being slow, it’s ok.

3. Is Apple slowly abandoning macOS now? If so, why bother updating MacBook lineup with ARM processor?
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why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

You are the most ideal customer Apple can have.

 

[CarlJ]

Aah..could we please just get a stable release at WWDC. No new features. Just fix what is there.

My 16” MBP has had wonderful sleep issues (every time I put it to sleep for more than 4 hours it’ll reboot randomly in that period.) Amazing machine otherwise...but sleep was one of the most solid features in every mac laptop i’ve owned since my first plastic Intel Macbook. And in 2020 somehow they’ve screwed that up.

This has come up before, and the workaround that has been repeatedly reported is to turn off Power Nap in settings, to get rid of the reboots. I can’t say if this works, because my Mac isn’t new enough to run Catalina, or have the problem, or have Power Nap.

Totally agree on the stable release though. Catalina has seemed to have substantial problems of one sort of another since it was in beta.

 

[Polymorphic]

And in other news; getting massive kernel panics on a brand new Mac Pro running 10.15.5 here. What are you even doing, Apple?!

Thanks for posting this. I haven't upgraded my 7,1 to 10.15.5 yet, and it sounds like I should hold off.

 

[PhillyGuy72]

Wow what is going on with Apple’s software QC process these days? I have never sat out an entire MacOS release before. I thought 10.15.5 would finally be stable enough to get me to upgrade from Mojave. But apparently not. And iOS 13 still has bugs that have been present since the first beta (looking at you, Mail). Something is really broken over at Apple right now.

Exactly my thoughts, I'm still on Mojave...I do usually wait 4-6 weeks after the initial release to see if there are issues. 10.5.5 LOOKED promising...but again I waited a few days to see if issues pop up. And here we are.


It's just not a stable release what so ever. (Might be for some, but I'm not taking any risks.) Still seeing problems with "kernel panics" , other bugs that were reported months ago on this OS also. No thanks. I'm skipping this version entirely.

 

[H2SO4]

This is so accurate! Catalina is a truly terrible release, but I seriously cannot comprehend the praise Microsoft gets for Windows 10... In my experience as a software developer, macOS is still miles ahead of Windows.

Whilst I've upvoted, I'll say your post is more subjective than it is accurate. It may have been miles ahead, but now......

 

[Fishrrman]

Catalina & APFS:
We'll do for your drive what "the butterfly" keyboard did for your laptop experience...!