trying to clone Mac mini before upgrading to most recent Monterey. Two commercial clone software packages failed. Tried the standard Mac disk restore to external drive, that failed. Very very weird errors. No time to troubleshoot that right now. I used to have a shell script I wrote to do my cloning haven’t used it for a few years, can’t find it on my archive external drives, don’t have time to write another one. Anyone have a simple Mac script run as root to just clone the boot to an external, given standard arguments or embedded variables? Shell script not compiled binary, don’t want to risk, shall we say, “a surprise“. Thanks in advance.
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Weird glitches cloning, need CLI help.
- Thread starter iwtunx
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Of course you can copy all your data, but I don't think you can really do a full, bootable clone of newer versions of MacOS. Apple has secured the operating system such that you are supposed to only use an "official" copy from them. See this:
"Copying Apple's system is now an Apple-proprietary endeavor; we can only offer "best effort" support for making an external bootable device on macOS Big Sur (and later OSes). We present this functionality in support of making ad hoc bootable copies of the system that you will use immediately (e.g. when migrating to a different disk, or for testing purposes), but we do not support nor recommend making bootable copies of the system as part of a backup strategy."
As for the "very weird errors" and making clones from the unix shell CLI, sorry, can't help you there.
"Copying Apple's system is now an Apple-proprietary endeavor; we can only offer "best effort" support for making an external bootable device on macOS Big Sur (and later OSes). We present this functionality in support of making ad hoc bootable copies of the system that you will use immediately (e.g. when migrating to a different disk, or for testing purposes), but we do not support nor recommend making bootable copies of the system as part of a backup strategy."
As for the "very weird errors" and making clones from the unix shell CLI, sorry, can't help you there.
SuperDuper (CCC, too) will create a bootable clone of Monterey running on an m-series Mac.
I've done it.
Be aware that to do this you must:
- connect via USB3 (I'll guess that thunderbolt works, too)
- use a drive that will support the process (I've found that slower platter-based drives may not work, so use an SSD as your "target")
- allow SD to COMPLETELY ERASE the target drive at the beginning of the process
- wait a while (the ENTIRE DRIVE must be cloned for this to work).
This will yield a bootable external drive.
But again, be aware:
- you cannot "update" the "secure system volume" -- it stays as it is until the next complete erase/re-clone
- you can incrementally update the "user" volume.
I've done it.
Be aware that to do this you must:
- connect via USB3 (I'll guess that thunderbolt works, too)
- use a drive that will support the process (I've found that slower platter-based drives may not work, so use an SSD as your "target")
- allow SD to COMPLETELY ERASE the target drive at the beginning of the process
- wait a while (the ENTIRE DRIVE must be cloned for this to work).
This will yield a bootable external drive.
But again, be aware:
- you cannot "update" the "secure system volume" -- it stays as it is until the next complete erase/re-clone
- you can incrementally update the "user" volume.
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