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

[Gary L. Gray]

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.

I also had this problem on my 16” MBP. Disabling Power Nap in the Energy Saver prefs fixed the problem for me. It’s not a solution, but at least it’s a workaround.

 

[jb-net]

I think the only thing they fix is level 1 severe issues or what are known as showstoppers.

I wish they would, but not even that. Sierra shipped with serious bugs resulting in data loss for many users! Not a showstopper? No, even 10.15.1 didn't fix it. Locally saved Mail data still got corrupted. I think it took them until 10.15.2 or 10.15.3 to finally address this issue. It must have been so embarrassing Apple didn't even acknowledge it in the release notes. A lot of other bugs in Sierra that many of us would consider serious are still present today.

Please, Apple tell me: What is a showstopper bug? A missing emoji?

 

[DeepIn2U]

Apple is stretched too thin — no longer focused on a few key products and deliver them well. They’ve decided to compete in so many areas and their core products are now suffering because of it. iOS 13 has been a cluster**** right from the beginning and just shows that their QC processes for software are below par.

Apple has multiple times of employees in programming though.

the issue is having 1 point person to oversee everything for 2 major OS’ now with 1 of them being a fork (iPadOS). This has been the issue many times over and like Catalina, Maverick, and other previous OS have had issues over and over again.

 

[TriBruin]

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)

I would argue that cloud is going to become essential. The current pandemic has driven employees form the office to homes with "God knows what" internet connection. So a company has to invest a significant VPN solution (and make sure it is setup right) or they can migrate to the cloud and give their employees access no matter where or what device they are using. While there are definitely edge cases that justify on-prem, most basic services (email, file hosting, etc.) would probably be better served by being in the cloud.

Beside, if a company lost their internet due to a back hoe, they would likely have been down anyway (unless their software is completely local. But, they still would not have received any email.) Any company big enough to support a cloud based system should have redundancy, even if that is just having a bunch of cellular MiFi devices to get on cellular.

 

[dannyyankou]

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.

Or people who may have to restore their Mac for whatever reason and don't want to lose their files?
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why would anybody bother backing up MacOS if everything is on the cloud these days?

I don't wan't to pay $120/year for 2tb iCloud storage, I'd rather just get the bigger hard drive.

 

[ruslansv]

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?

Yeah - that's the pattern. It's not just that all software has bugs - it's

1. Serious unexpected kernel API bugs that should have been tested in an automated manner (which means there's insufficient - to put it charitably - unit test coverage overall)

2. It takes them forever to fix bugs (because they break more things in the process and are afraid to touch it).

3. An old adage - where there's one bug - there are many. That is what they are experiencing - a snowball effect of more and more bugs, slower and slower dev velocity - a vicious cycle. They seriously need to invest here and start addressing quality problem in a principled manner - before they do become as bad as Windows before Nadella took over.

 

[4487549]

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.

Join the club. My colleagues and I have been waiting a full release cycle for the past 3+ years (and it gets easier every year).

 

[DeepIn2U]

Expecting beta testers to be creating bootable backups of their main drive with a Beta may not be a reasonable expectation. ;-)

their programmers testing their marketable software against a beta to ensure after GM release their software will work.

a very real expectation.

 

[Hawaiian Starman]

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

Not everyone lives under the same cloud. In South Africa I’m faced with expensive data costs and somewhat slow internet. Extensive cloud use/reliance is simply not a viable option. Apple compounds the problem by making downloads to my IOS devices device-centric. Hence I can’t download once and migrate to other devices as I used to do via iTunes.

As far as DL Catalina or any sizeable update to the OS, I create a clone on a backup flash stick, then port it over to my other machine. Otherwise I would have to DL twice and wind up with excessive data costs etc. Hence, this latest “bug” has the potential to be nothing short of an expensive PITA.

 

[VictorTango777]

It doesn’t seem like Public Betas are helping Apple. Either nobody is submitting these bugs or their QC is stretching to thin.

Apple wants users to provide detailed information in problem reports, but they make the Feedback Assistant application painful to use. On high resolution monitors, the text is too small to read without straining. There is no ability to increase text size. The problem description field is too small to enter detailed information and it can't be resized to show more text. Is this a form of suppression to discourage people from sending problem reports?

 

[KPOM]

Every day Apple moves the ball closer and closer to the day when all Mac will run on a closed macOS system and only Apple approved store apps will run on their desktops and the complete elimination of 3rd party apps and access to the root level as we have accepted on iOS.

If you read the Steve Jobs biography, you’d know that was ultimately Steve Jobs’s goal. He didn’t think customers should ever open their machines, etc. Which is why I laugh whenever self-defined “pros” say “Steve Jobs would never have [removed some feature they liked]”.
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Time for MacOS OSX get LTSB version without feature updates, just stability.

Honestly Apple ruined OSX since annual release adopted, Desktop don’t need to this way, I need my good stable OS for work. (and have fun)

Microsoft has adopted a semi-annual update model for Windows 10, which, according to many posters here, is far more stable and superior to macOS, so the annual release cycle isn’t the problem.

 

[VictorTango777]

I'm curious to know who is better at developer relations, Apple or Microsoft regarding:
Communication with developers
Responsiveness and support with issues raised by developers

 

[nvmls]

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

Impressive post.

 

[UnusedLoginID]

Or people who may have to restore their Mac for whatever reason and don't want to lose their files?
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I don't wan't to pay $120/year for 2tb iCloud storage, I'd rather just get the bigger hard drive.

So let me ask you… where is that backup hard drive of yours located? I thought so! No safety in having your backup drive next to your computer, you know if God forbids your house/office burns down or you get robbed.
So now you’re telling me you have a second backup drive (twice the price now!) and you’re taking it offsite. Good! That’sWhat everybody should be doing with physical backups.
Now how much time do you spend doing the two backups, taking the drive offsite and then realizing one of your drive has crashed - it happens more often than you think and want!
And then what if you’re not around your home/office, say traveling, your computer has crashed, you have it replaced or repaired and you need your data NOW!
Now think about cloud backup… it happens automatically, you’re not responsible for the backup and redundancy of that data and you can restore anywhere.
Trust me, your time spent, purchasing hard drives regularly and always worrying if you’ll be able to retrieve the data is not worth the aggravation.
$100 a year for 2TB iCloud storage is a bargain! (use discounted iTunes cards to get to $100 cost instead of $120).

 

[kingtj]

I don't comment often, but when I do... it is to confirm that if Mike Bombich is saying this is a problem, then this is a problem.

True, and I agree with his summary of the issue. I'm thinking this bug will affect "SuperDuper" as well as Carbon Copy Cloner? But at the same time? I suspect Apple is trying to slowly make disk replication software obsolete.

With things like TPMS chips in new machines doing drive encryption and all the changes with the APFS file system allowing multiple logical partitions on different drives to appear as a single drive volume, they're making it more and more difficult to do properly.

Corporations were advised a year or two ago to stop imaging new Macs with pre-made drive images, and to instead use something like JAMF Pro to push your configuration customizations and software installs to what starts as a plain OS X recovery type installation.

 

[derekamoss]

Just use Windows for one week and macOS will be perfect again. Believe me I’m an IT and half week I’m working for a big company with everything Microsoft related. HELL ON EARTH.

Just use Windows for one week and macOS will be perfect again. Believe me I’m an IT and half week I’m working for a big company with everything Microsoft related. HELL ON EARTH.

Then you are a crappy IT guy who has no knowledge of his field. If you are good at your job, Windows shouldn't be any harder as setting up a Mac network. Infact it might even be easier. If you are talking about stability, Windows 10 is pretty stable and based on the PC's I have dealt with the last few years, MacOS has been a bigger problem when it comes to stability.

Just because you love MacOS and hate Windows and obviously, If, you were a good IT you would have kept up with, even if it wasn't required, on the latest of the Windows IT world. Companies don't hire a mac IT or a windows IT, they order an IT that is capable and assume will keep up with all current changes on both sides.

 

[noraa]

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.

Um, no. I use CCC to create bootable backups all the time. They are great for disaster recovery.

It’s amazing and dismaying how the dumpster fire that is Catalina continues to burn brighter after each point update.

 

[cmaier]

So let me ask you… where is that backup hard drive of yours located? I thought so! No safety in having your backup drive next to your computer, you know if God forbids your house/office burns down or you get robbed.

That’s actually not true. Even an on-site backup is better than nothing. There are a lot of failure scenarios where such a backup is useful (including accidental data corruption/destruction, failed drive, failed machine, disaster that affects the computer but not the backup drive, etc.)

So now you’re telling me you have a second backup drive (twice the price now!) and you’re taking it offsite. Good! That’sWhat everybody should be doing with physical backups.
Now how much time do you spend doing the two backups, taking the drive offsite and then realizing one of your drive has crashed - it happens more often than you think and want!

I backup my machine to drives in two locations, by taking my machine between my home and my office. I spend no “time doing” the backups - my computer does them without any intervention from me, and it doesn’t interrupt my workflow in the least.

And then what if you’re not around your home/office, say traveling, your computer has crashed, you have it replaced or repaired and you need your data NOW!

That’s a risk, which is why my home backup server allows me to access my backups remotely. It’s a relatively smaller risk, of course. Your machine is most likely to fail in the location where it spends the most time (so long as you handle it with care while in transit).

Now think about cloud backup… it happens automatically, you’re not responsible for the backup and redundancy of that data and you can restore anywhere.

you realize that backups from software like CCC also happen automatically, right?

And with cloud backups that means someone else has a copy of your data, which whether you consider it a security risk or not, is actually a very severe legal risk for certain types of data, and many employers don’t allow you to do that anyway.

Trust me, your time spent, purchasing hard drives regularly and always worrying if you’ll be able to retrieve the data is not worth the aggravation.
$100 a year for 2TB iCloud storage is a bargain! (use discounted iTunes cards to get to $100 cost instead of $120).

I’m not sure how you buy hard drives, but it doesn’t take a lot of time. And with 2-disk redundancy on my synology boxes that I use for backups, with redundant fans, there’s not really very much to worry about on that end, either.

 

[kingtj]

Then you are a crappy IT guy who has no knowledge of his field. If you are good at your job, Windows shouldn't be any harder as setting up a Mac network. Infact it might even be easier. If you are talking about stability, Windows 10 is pretty stable and based on the PC's I have dealt with the last few years, MacOS has been a bigger problem when it comes to stability.

Just because you love MacOS and hate Windows and obviously, If, you were a good IT you would have kept up with, even if it wasn't required, on the latest of the Windows IT world. Companies don't hire a mac IT or a windows IT, they order an IT that is capable and assume will keep up with all current changes on both sides.

That's probably an unfair statement too, really. I've been working for many years in I.T. for places that support both PC and Mac platforms, and there's good and bad about both. But Windows 10, especially, has posed some real headaches with Microsoft's insistence on treating it like an endlessly evolving product instead of a static one with "service packs" put out at set intervals. I've seen laptops that ran Win 10 just fine until an updated build was pushed where they completely broke the audio or video support, for example. They're really not testing the product like they used to, in a QA test lab with as wide a variety of hardware as they can gather up to try it on. These days, Microsoft only does automated QA testing with software they run that tries to "break" various things. If a problem isn't caught by the automated testing, it goes into the release and the public has to deal with it.

At least so far, OS X has been less likely to render machines unbootable or broken just because a point release was downloaded and installed. I mean, Apple knows exactly what hardware configurations they've sold people over the years. They don't have to worry about nearly as many random combinations.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

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.

They praise Windows 10, because Windows 10 is far better than Windows 8 or 7 was, even from an IT perspective. Definite improvement, but as you said, still not at the macOS level in numerous areas.

 

[rgbrock1]

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

Um, maybe because some of us don't want to store our secure files on someone else's servers?

 

[derekamoss]

That's probably an unfair statement too, really. I've been working for many years in I.T. for places that support both PC and Mac platforms, and there's good and bad about both. But Windows 10, especially, has posed some real headaches with Microsoft's insistence on treating it like an endlessly evolving product instead of a static one with "service packs" put out at set intervals. I've seen laptops that ran Win 10 just fine until an updated build was pushed where they completely broke the audio or video support, for example. They're really not testing the product like they used to, in a QA test lab with as wide a variety of hardware as they can gather up to try it on. These days, Microsoft only does automated QA testing with software they run that tries to "break" various things. If a problem isn't caught by the automated testing, it goes into the release and the public has to deal with it.

At least so far, OS X has been less likely to render machines unbootable or broken just because a point release was downloaded and installed. I mean, Apple knows exactly what hardware configurations they've sold people over the years. They don't have to worry about nearly as many random combinations.

I wouldn't say unfair, but I might have been a little harsh and also you can't blame MS completely about their QA, because no IT department should be rushing to put out anything other than security updates. Test and do your own QA a few weeks to make sure there aren't any problems and also to see if any problems pop up online, then deploy them throughout company.

 

[MaxinMusicCity]

An Apple File System bug has been discovered in macOS 10.15.5 Catalina that can prevent users from making a bootable clone of their system drive, according to the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner.

In a blog post on Wednesday, software developer Mike Bombich explained that the CCC team had uncovered the issue in the Apple File System, or APFS, when attempting to create a bootable backup in a beta version of macOS 10.15.5.

According to Bombich, the bug prevents CCC from using its own file copier to establish an initial bootable backup of a macOS Catalina System volume. In technical terms:
On a positive note, existing backups created in macOS 10.15.4 and earlier are unaffected, the bug has no effect on CCC's ability to preserve data, nor does it affect the integrity of the filesystems on a startup disk or a backup disk. In short, the impact of this bug is limited to the initial creation of a bootable backup.

Any CCC users who established their backup on a previous version of Catalina already has functional firmlinks on their bootable volume and CCC will continue to update that volume just fine. Meanwhile, users wanting to create a new backup of a 10.15.5 volume to an empty disk should replace their copy of CCC with the CCC 5.1.18 beta, then follow these steps on launching the app.

1. Click the X button in the Destination selector box to clear the destination selection.
2. Click on the Destination selector and reselect the destination volume.

CCC will then guide users through the procedure of creating a bootable backup, or a Data-only backup instead. The new functionality uses Apple's Software Restore (ASR) utility and is documented here.

Bombich has notified Apple of the bug, but he ends his blog post by entertaining the possibility that it is a security fix to prevent third-parties from creating firmlinks. If so, he argues, "this is far worse than a bug," since the system currently reports a success when it should report a failure, not to mention that Apple's lack of documentation on the change is hostile to third-party developers who rely on documented functionality.

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

Are Apple & Microsoft vying to see who can have the buggiest OS ?
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A bug in Catalina? No way! Apple makes both the hardware and the software so things work flawle… 🤡

NOT!

 

[MaxinMusicCity]

Yeah - that's the pattern. It's not just that all software has bugs - it's

1. Serious unexpected kernel API bugs that should have been tested in an automated manner (which means there's insufficient - to put it charitably - unit test coverage overall)

2. It takes them forever to fix bugs (because they break more things in the process and are afraid to touch it).

3. An old adage - where there's one bug - there are many. That is what they are experiencing - a snowball effect of more and more bugs, slower and slower dev velocity - a vicious cycle. They seriously need to invest here and start addressing quality problem in a principled manner - before they do become as bad as Windows before Nadella took over.

And another adage: If It Ain't Broke...DON'T "fix" it!

 

[Marx55]

More:

macOS 10.15.5
Alas, the update does not fix the remaining data loss issue with Apple Mail. Mail’s version number is unchanged since macOS 10.15.4.

Michael Tsai - Blog - macOS 10.15.5

mjtsai.com