System restore problem
 

I ran into a big problem today trying to do a system restore. I have had Superduper! for years and have done many system restores and never had a restore problem before. I do a smart update backup of my boot drive early each Sunday morning. I rotate between 2 partitions ( MacbookProOdd and MacbookProEven) on an external USB drive. This mornings went to MacbookProOdd. I installed Catalina, and had a problem with VMWare Fusion, and decided to restore back to Mojava. I booted to MacbookProOdd with no problem. I tried Copy: MacbookProOdd to Macintosh HD, Restore – all files, erasing Macintosh HD. When I clicked Copy Now, nothing happened. I thought maybe I couldn’t restore from the drive I was booted from (not the way I remembered from the past). I booted MacbookProEven and tried again. Same result. I then restored using disk utility with no problem.

Some interesting info: On my Scheduled Copies screen it shows MacbookProOdd Next copy Sun. Apr 19, Last Copy Sun, Mar 15. MacbookProEven Next copy Sun. Apr 12, Last Copy Sun, Mar 29. The MacbookProEven is correct. The MacbookProOdd is missing this mornings backup in Last Copy. The log for this date is missing. The DU restore, restored as if it worked this morning (I have files from yesterday).

Running Superduper! 3.3.1, macbookpro (mid 2012), Mac OS X 10.14.6. External USB drive is 2TB Seagate.

Any ideas what could be wrong or anything I can gather?

The problem is that you didn't fully erase the drive that you had Catalina on, and instead likely either didn't remove one of the two volumes, or left a volume around that was a "partial" volume group (converted by Catalina).

When you restore from Catalina to Mojave, you need to fully erase the drive, recreating a single, non-group, non-Catalina-role volume... I go over this lower in this forum.

Dave, thanks for your quick reply. Just to understand, as I have done many system restores with no problem and I want to play around with Catalina and be able to get back, I have an observation and question. I think you are saying before doing the SD restore to a Catalina drive, I need to do an erase with DU (even though I have erase of target in SD)? When I did the DU restore, I saw two drives being wiped (one - data?) which I did not understand?

I was leary of APFS awhile ago when I setup of rotating restores, so I set one up as APFS and the other as Ma OS extended. Should I have both as APFS now?

Yes, they should generally be APFS.

When you restored with Disk Utility, it did a low-level restore which wiped all the volumes. If you look at my other messages here, you'll see what I recommend for going back to Mojave - erasing from the hardware level, which will get rid of the divided volume setup Catalina creates.