Post #3738648

2026-07-11 11:43 UTC

Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it’s the kind of thing that makes “this is easy” difficult to take seriously. Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.

Replies (2)

@NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2026-07-11 20:26

Well yes, but with a current Mac there are its own issues. It probably won’t boot at all, or by design it will fall back to the internal drive even if you tell it to boot from USB It also can silently corrupt your data on either disk because of how it handles updates if you continue to do use both at the same time.

Open ##3746727
@jbrains@sh.itjust.works 2026-07-12 14:43

Ugh. No. I still don’t know how to just boot this backup. When I try it in an older laptop, the keyboard and trackpad stop working once I log in. I presume this is a hardware driver problem. Presumably that’s unavoidable. I am, of course, not eager to screw up the BIOS settings on my daily laptop. I couldn’t figure out how to boot the cloned drive in a VirtualBox VM. The tutorials seem to assume that I have a virtual disk image or enough internal hard disk space to copy the cloned drive locally in order to run it locally. That defeats the purpose. So I’m stuck. If I can’t just boot to the USB external drive because of UUID clashes, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to have gained by cloning my laptop’s internal hard disk. I have a backup that I can’t safely boot to. 🤷

Open ##3763522