Some news from CCC and SuperDuper

[chriskleeman]

Needing to put a newer Mac into service, been looking into some stuff. Here are a couple of posts from the two main cloning software folks concerning Big Sur and the newer M1 based Macs, might be of interest:

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/macos-big-sur-known-issues

https://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/

ck

[krissel]

That's depressing. Not eager to get a new Mac until I know I can have external bootable clones.


Oh well, will just muddle along with my present setup and hope it lasts long enough...

[jchuzi]

Read this entire FTM thread about this subject, particularly joemikeb's recommendation for being able to boot an external drive on M1 Macs.

[Paddy]

Depressing indeed...luckily both my Macs are less than 2 years old, so should be good for a few years yet!! I am running Catalina and have no intention of moving to Big Sur until I have to, which is rather unusual for me. I bought Parallels (15) and find out not too much later that it doesn't work with Big Sur. And V16 still has issues. And they want $65 for the upgrade - that still has issues. Since I have the Historical Society PCs downstairs at the moment, the ability to view website designs on PC browsers - and walk clients through things on PCs (which I seem to have to do with annoying regularity) is right here without messing around with virtualization. Until we re-open the Historical Room post-COVID, the PCs will live here. Of course I curse Windows daily. (Why, oh why, can't they fix their damn user interface? - Windows Explorer is like something dreamed up by a lunatic, and Explorer search is beyond useless...)

But all that aside, I hate that Apple seems to be making things ever more closed/non-upgradeable and worse, non-repairable. (it's not just them - every computer manufacturer is doing this - and it's the most incredibly environmentally unfriendly thing to be doing. Ethically bankrupt, IMHO) There is now only ONE Mac other than the Mac Pro, that even has upgradeable RAM. (27" iMacs) I expect that will go away too once they switch those to M1 or whatever variant they'll use for the desktops.

Interesting rumours re: new models though - 32 cores (!) and rumours of a half-size Mac Pro. Ah yes...but will it be half the price? Unlikely.

https://www.imore.com/32-core-apple-m1-successor-reportedly-set-imac-mac-pro-next-year

[chriskleeman]

Wow... Thanks Jon!  Lots of work to accomplish a working backup, and a couple of interesting workarounds for sure...

Does make me maybe a little more confident to get out on the bleeding edge... definitely going to have to upgrade my external drives and get the latest version of Techtool Pro if I get an M1 Mac. But reading through that thread, there seems to be no one method of actually making a bootable cloned drive drive on an M1 Mac, so I may have to resort to the most recent Intel Mac I can afford if I want to be able to have a cloned, bootable backup.

But, Catalina should be an OS that will go for quite a few years unless the kinks that presently exist in Big Sur can be addressed by SuperDuper and CCC, and and the newer Intel machines should be able to run whatever OS Apple throws at us for quite a while.

Kinda reminds me of when Apple put nothing but Thunderbolt 3 ports on the Macbook Pros in 2016. That was a hardware decision, but it was way out in front of most of the hardware available at the time. In a similar fashion, The M1 Macs and Big Sur seem to be a little ahead of their time with software issues.

ck

[sluggo]

With this news I went in and disabled automatic OS updates. I'll coast along as far as possible on Catalina.
The old Mini (late 2012 model) has been updated with SSD and maxed out memory so hopefully will serve for some more years.

[jchuzi]

Detailed, step-by-step instructions: How to start up your M1 Mac from an external drive. There seems to be a typo in the article. One World Computing should be Other World Computing.