Backing Up macOS 10.15 Beta

Dave Nanian:

FYI, anyone using Catalina - SuperDuper does NOT work properly. Please don’t rely on it under Catalina until we’ve managed to figure out why, or if it’s possible.

Mike Bombich:

In the Finder you’ll only see one volume that represents your startup disk and it will appear as if everything is on that single volume. In reality, the startup disk that you see in the Finder is the read-only system volume and doesn’t have any of your data on it; the “Data” volume is separate and hidden.

[…]

Allow me to be the first to say it: stick a fork in it, HFS is done. HFS simply won’t work for making a backup of a Catalina system volume, so in the near future, we’re going to drop support for backing up macOS (Catalina and later) to HFS+ formatted volumes.

Dave Nanian:

Anyone out there able to create a disk group under Catalina with diskutil? I keep getting ( (disk3s1 role S):

diskutil ap createVolume disk3 APFS "MacBook Backup-Data" -role D -groupWith disk3s1
<snip>
Error: -69624: Unable to add a new APFS Volume to an APFS Container

The answer, if anyone cares, is that you have to add a system volume to a data volume. You can’t add a data volume to a system volume. Because…reasons?

Previously:

• macOS 10.15 Beta
• Security & Privacy in macOS 10.15 Beta

Update (2019-07-10): John Martellaro:

In this timely post-WWDC show, Mike [Bombich] joins me to explain the structure of APFS drives and the new read-only System files in macOS Catalina. He explained new features of volumes in macOS 10.15, especially how the System is isolated from the Data volume (which contains /Users). He also explained the new firmlinks that tie these two volumes together, making them appear as one. Finally, Mike explained how Carbon Copy Cloner external drives can no longer be HFS+ in Catalina but must become APFS.

Dave Nanian (tweet):

This new arrangement presents those of us who are creating bootable backups with—and I’ll employ my mildest language here; the forehead-shaped dents in my desk tell a different story—something of a challenge: we can’t write to a system volume (again, it’s read-only) and we can’t create firmlinks.

So...how are we going to create backups? How are we going to restore them?

[…]

These changes will be as extensive as the ones we had to make when APFS was introduced, if not more so. We have to take a quite different approach to copying, make understandable errors appear when the underlying system APIs provide no details, and we have to depend on a bunch of new, unfinished, un-and-under-documented things to make any of this work at all.

[…]

So far, while we’ve validated the general approach, we’ve run into a lot of problems around the edges. Catalina’s file system and tools are rife with bugs. Every time we head down one path, we’re confronted with unexpected behavior, undocumented tools, crashes and failures.

Apple File System (APFS) Backup Carbon Copy Cloner Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina SuperDuper

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