Use a Cloned Drive to Recover From Mac Failures
I got up and running in no time because I keep a USB drive permanently attached to my Mac Studio, and make sure it’s a complete clone of my drive. When I reinstalled macOS Sequoia, I was able to use Migration Assistant to restore from my cloned backup drive, and it returned me to more or less the same state I had been in when the computer died.
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Yes, I also do a Time Machine backup—because it’s nice to have redundancy and it can be helpful in grabbing a file that’s changed in the past. It used to be that Time Machine was a must-have because your cloned disk wasn’t really a backup, since it only contained the most recent view of your disk, and if a file was deleted a few days earlier, it would not be retrievable.
But with the advent of Apple’s APFS filesystem, tools like Carbon Copy Cloner use the APFS snapshot feature to fill up all the excess space on your backup drive—remember, I bought a 2TB drive for a 1TB disk—with previous versions of your disk. So there are some extra layers of protection, though I’m still running Time Machine and Backblaze too. You can never have enough data protection.
It’s nice that Migration Assistant makes it so easy to restore. The downside is that it can be slow, even if the clone is on an SSD. Back in the day you could just boot directly from the clone and be up and running almost immediately. It helps to keep the bulk of your data files on separate drives or partition so that restoring the home folder doesn’t take as long.
Over the last few weeks I’ve had several questions from those trying to use TM in more demanding circumstances. This article explains how you can design volume layout and backup exclusions for the most efficient backups in such cases.
Previously:
- Snapshots Aren’t Backups
- Lessons From a Bad Apple Repair Experience
- SuperDuper 3.8 Beta
- Why You Can No Longer Roll Back a macOS Update
- Time Machine Evolution and APFS
- Which Devices Should You Boot Your M1 Mac From?
- The Role of Bootable Duplicates in a Modern Backup Strategy
Update (2024-11-01): Howard Oakley:
By archiving, I mean putting precious files somewhere they can be retrieved in at least ten years time. They may include financial, business, employment and personal records, as well as all finished work that you want to record for posterity. For most, they’ll also include a careful selection of still images, movies, and the more important documents you might create, such as books, theses and papers. They’re what you and the law want you to keep in perpetuity, and to be able to retrieve even after you’re gone.
To see how this can be achieved, I consider: the storage medium to be used, file formats that will be retrievable, how to index them for access, physical storage conditions, and the checks of their integrity that are needed.
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If you’re serious about maintaining your archives, some form of integrity checking, such as that provided by my free utilities Dintch, Fintch and cintch, is essential. Check a sample on each disk once a year, to ensure that none has started to deteriorate. If you do detect errors, that’s the time to burn a replacement before the original is lost to decay.
I use USB sticks and hard drives for my archives and DropDMG and EagleFiler for integrity checking.
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Can confirm you can't restore a Mac from a clone just by cloning the clone back onto it anymore, but this issue goes back to the Intel era.
I had an Intel Macbook Pro with Touch Bar & Touch ID that needed repair (in total it ended up needing 5 or 6) and I was very used to restoring a repaired Mac by cloning my clone back onto it. But when I did that with this machine, Apple Pay would no longer work properly anymore. I went several rounds with Apple Support and got escalated a couple of times, but Apple never figured it out or gave me a solution.
At some point I tried Migration Assistant - it worked flawlessly and Apple Pay was back up & running. Since then I've only ever used Migration Assistant.
I used to use carbon copy cloner and had it back up changes every hour and my external drive become unusable after a couple of months. So the whole SSDs can take several writes isn’t necessarily true. Snell recommends a single daily backup in his post. I use Time Machine only, but I’ll use take his advice as well.
It might be interesting to cover SSD data retention when not connected to power. That was a wake-up call for me, although I haven’t done much.
@Daniel, you just had a faulty SSD. Carbon Copy Cloner copies incremental changes, it isn’t rewriting the whole drive from scratch every time it runs a backup.
I do a daily CCC backup plus Time Machine (which is hourly?) — both to the same external drive (Crucial X10 Pro) that is partitioned in two. I also backup to the cloud.
I miss being able to clone my drives. There's no real reason this shouldn't work, especially if using the same hardware as a replacement and could in theory still use encrypted backup drives, but Apple security theatre wipes out more useful options.
