M1 Mac Mini. Big Sur OS. Been using using SuperDuper for years but no upgrade or use for APFS. Apparently it's been a bitch to develop a complete, bootable, simple backup utility. So I waited.
Finally got the M1 Mini with Big Sur and bought Super Duper 3.5.

It just works. Just like it always did. Fast, simple. Nuff said.

Agree.....recent experience was success / good Thank you to the developers.

---

Long time Mac user

Good to know.
It's a free update for users: existing copies of SuperDuper! will
auto-upgrade the next time they are run...
SuperDuper's website

(not on App Store)

---

39°36'17"N 75°44'43"W

DuckDuckGo
The search engine that doesn't track you.

DemComm Records 2021 Greatest Hits
includes:
Taxman by Joe & Nancy's Rich Ice Cream Band
The Humpty Dance by The Harris-Brown Hookup
Lets Spend The Night Together by The Fang-Swalwell Gang
Díaz-Canel Is A Friend of Ours by The AOC Squad
My Old Kentucky Retirement Home by MitchMcC & The Soggy Boxer Boys
Burning Down The House by Merrick & The Goons
Back In the USSR by Bernie's Red Square Trio

Haven't used it in years. I started with CCC many years ago, and switched to SuperDuper because of some long-forgotten issue with CCC. Then, after several years of use, I had some issues and went back to CCC. Been very happy with it.

Let's hear from the CCC owners re Big Sur.

Bootable backups on M1 macs is an interesting feature if it really works.

I just read the steps in the blog... seems as basic as it gets.

No mention of Tbolt only cases.

Maybe I will give it a try on my our M1 mini and a Crucial X8 drive I have laying around. I could not get Bug Sur to install on it, since its not Tbolt, just USB C.

---

Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

The issue with Big Sur and beyond is that Apple has shut third parties out of making bootable system backups by introducing a signed system volume. CCC and SD can *facilitate* a bootable backup, but neither can create it directly, no matter how anyone chooses to spin it. We were able to create a bootable Big Sur backup almost from day 1 (long before SD) because we had heavily experimented with ASR and already had (previously rejected) code that we could drop in.

Here's from our blog: "All on its own, Big Sur introduced a significant new change to the creation of an external boot device. The operating system now resides on a cryptographically sealed "Signed System Volume" that can only be copied by an Apple-proprietary utility, "Apple Software Restore" (ASR). We were already familiar with ASR, so fairly quickly we were making bootable backups of Big Sur back in November. It hasn't been perfect though. We've performed tens of thousands of ASR clones at this point, and we've discovered that ASR is just not as robust as our own file copier. There are many scenarios where ASR simply fails with no explanation. ASR is also very one-dimensional; choosing to copy the system requires that we sacrifice other backup features, e.g. we cannot copy the system and retain versioned backups of your data, we can't evaluate what was copied, we can't exclude items from the initial backup, we can't save checksum data for later verification. So, while we're certainly able to make a bootable copy of the system with ASR, it starts to feel like using it causes us to lose sight of what's actually important to back up – your irreplaceable data."

Be that as it may; for me it works perfectly now just as it has for the last 15-20 yrs. I backed up to a USB 3 drive and later started up in Big Sur from that drive. Slow, as expected, but it worked as expected. My usual experience with SuperDuper!.