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Old 10-28-2022, 06:46 PM
fork fork is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 11
Big Sur bootable backup

I finally made the jump to Big Sur a few months ago on a 2020 iMac and I've been happily doing backups with SD and CCC. As you know CCC outright states they can't back up any Big Sur or later systems as bootable backups. But I must have misunderstood something I read stating that SD had figured out a way around this.

Today I tried to boot from a freshly made Big Sur backup (using SD) residing on an external SSD drive and found it was impossible. I had used your 3.6 so I Googled and found an entry in your blog about 3.7 which stated 3.7 is "fully compatible with Big Sur, Monterey, and Ventura, the latest releases of macOS, is Apple silicon native, and produces fully bootable HFS+ and APFS backups faster and easier than ever."

"Fully bootable" sounded good.

I tried 3.7. Same problem - couldn't choose it in System Preferences > Startup Disk.

So after more research found your Oct 17 blog post that pointed the finger at Apple.

OK, now I'm trying to understand how this might work.

I have this recent backup on an SSD. Do I run the Big Sur installer and choose the SSD as target and after that's done, I can boot from it?

If yes, can I use a newer version of the installer (11.7.1)? The backup of have uses Big Sur 11.6

Are there other monsters lurking in the hidden recesses of that backup that will prevent booting from it?
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