If you’re considering an M1 Mac and you prefer an external drive bootable backup/recovery then you might want to consider the following.
The Big Sur installer app seems to have issues with an external drive. I found that it wouldn’t work when trying to install Big Sur on a drive connected via a USB-A port. It did work when connected to a USB-C port. Also the installer seems to prefer SSD rather than hard drives - that is, you are more likely to get an external copy of Big Sur that will reliably boot from an SSD. Hard drive seems hit and miss. If you like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) then you may know that there isn’t a working version of SuperDuper! for M1 Macs. And for CCC the latest version only copies data and not system files. if you have a reliable bootable external drive with Big Sur with CCC remember to copy to the APFS Data volume on the external drive/partition - it isn’t enough to use just the drive/partition name. I’ve also had issues with using Migration Assistant to copy onto the external drive. As far as I can identify the app only works if the drive is connected to a Thunderbolt/USB-C port. It doesn’t seem run properly in any other circumstances. The CCC developer has a lot about the above in a blog post at their website - unfortunately not written for mere mortals in my view. Shirt Pocket is silent at the mo, and I wonder if this is the end of the road for SuperDuper! On the plus side Time Machine is much faster on an M1 Mac, even if it is using a hard drive. Not sure if this due to the M1 SoC, Big Sur, or a combination of both, but in looking at run times compared to our old core i3 Mac mini the figures suggest as much as 5 times quicker. I haven’t tried to rewind back to an earlier version of a file/folder so can’t comment on that - I did notice that with APFS the latest version of CCC can also do version recovery, which I presume is because of the snapshot mechanism that APFS uses. Let’s hope that 2021 is full of good surprises - we need some! -- Tony Crooks [email protected] +44 7428 706227 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/CAHkKbUD7uqrOjo-f-xmr8y0kHj0N8Hn3xWp745THxyLq2HojSg%40mail.gmail.com.
