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macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

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Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#31

Post by sonofhans »

jeffbee wrote: post #22

Gotta be honest, I find the idea of a bootable backup disk to be defective. What if it was an OS bug that wiped out your volume, and booting the backup does the exact same thing to the backup, because of the same bug?

Oh, I’ve used SuperDuper for years, and I adore it. Several years ago I had a spinning rust HD die in a Macbook. I plugged my backed drive into it, booted, and had access to all my stuff. Without that drive I would have needed another computer.

I could keep going making a list of all the ways I’ve found a bootable clone of a MacOS machine to be useful, but damn, I’d hate to live without it.

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#32

Post by kelnos »

haileys wrote: post #25

> This sucks. We think it sucks. You think it sucks. But we can't fix it: Apple has to do so. And this is why I gave up on macOS several years ago now and moved to Linux. It's not about which OS is better or worse. All software has bugs. It's about the empowerment to _do something_ about the inevitable bugs, rather than wait and hope that a fix comes down from above.

And not just that: if an update breaks my Linux install, I can figure out what broke it and roll back to an older version. Rolling back updates on macOS or Windows is just... not really a thing, at least not without a full reinstall, assuming you even have installation media for older versions these days.

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#33

Post by radicality »

jeffbee wrote: post #22

Gotta be honest, I find the idea of a bootable backup disk to be defective. What if it was an OS bug that wiped out your volume, and booting the backup does the exact same thing to the backup, because of the same bug?

I’m thinking similarly.

I’ve been using normal Time Machine backups, together with iCloud (not really backup), occasional copies of data I care about to external SSDs, and occasional encrypted backups to remote storage (rsync.net)

But it never even occurred to me to want a bootable backup or include the OS in it. In fact whenever I upgrade my MacBook, I choose to set it up as a fresh device and don’t use any of the tooling to copy everything-and-anything.

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#34

Post by brigade »

sam1r wrote: post #10
a2tech wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from the SuperDuper backup folks. SuperDuper is a tool that you can use to make bootable backups of your macOS system. Apple took away the ability for 3rd party tools to manipulate the OS and copy it to another partition/drive and took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2. So that breaks SuperDuper's ability to make a nice, clean, bo…

Is this something intentional that Apple has publicly stated in some realm? AFAIK, in that case, maybe it's just a bug that they're planning to fix...

Which part? The inability for 3rd parties to create bootable images instead of using Apple-signed tools? Because that was 4 years ago and is kind of a fundamental requirement for the chain of trust needed for signed system volume security introduced back then.

Or are you arguing that this blog post is wrong in asserting the OS release this week introduced a bug in those tools?

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#36

Post by radicality »

therein wrote: post #3

It also kernel panics if you power down external monitor but keep HDMI connected or have an HDMI output device that is powered off. It was a great out-of-the-box experience for my new MacBook Pro.

It obviously shouldn’t panic, but have you looked at the dumps for what could be the cause? Or perhaps try a different cable and/or different hdmi device? It’s still a bug, but perhaps it’s a non-spec-compliant hdmi cable or device?

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#37

Post by alwayslikethis »

iamnotsure wrote: post #24

managed software, managed hardware, managed people

One of the worst things about the move to smartphones is the inability to make full backups. I don't understand. It's my own device, all the data belongs to me, and I should be able to back it up whenever I want.

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#38

Post by alwayslikethis »

jeffbee wrote: post #22

Gotta be honest, I find the idea of a bootable backup disk to be defective. What if it was an OS bug that wiped out your volume, and booting the backup does the exact same thing to the backup, because of the same bug?

You can roll back to a backup right before the OS update that caused the bug. For example I have hourly snapshots using btrfs. Each snapshot is entirely bootable by itself, so if I ever broke anything, I just roll back. The system snapshots are read-only, so they are unlikely to be destroyed by bugs like that. You can also just make another snapshot of the same snapshot to be safer. It's also separate from the user data I care about.

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#39

Post by imbnwa »

FredPret wrote: post #21
xyst wrote: post #17

Apple just can’t add features to their OS without breaking existing ones. Probably used Apple Intelligence to QA the OS release. Steve Jobs would be disgusted at what his company has become. “Just works”, my ass

On the one hand, it looks like they're getting MBA'ed slowly: the product lineup is getting more tangled every year (just try picking an iPad) as they search for more ways to slice and dice the market. On the other hand: they created Apple Silicon in recent years.

Didn't they originally buy PA Semi while Jobs was on watch?

Re: macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

#40

Post by dymk »

haileys wrote: post #25

> This sucks. We think it sucks. You think it sucks. But we can't fix it: Apple has to do so. And this is why I gave up on macOS several years ago now and moved to Linux. It's not about which OS is better or worse. All software has bugs. It's about the empowerment to _do something_ about the inevitable bugs, rather than wait and hope that a fix comes down from above.

In theory I can make bluetooth and wifi and deep-sleep work with Linux, but am I actually able to fix it? No, and not for a lack of trying. If we're talking about practical ability to fix what goes wrong with my daily driver, then macOS still wins hands down.
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