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evan.v Author

Level 1

13 points

Restore volume with diskutil, target gets bigger than source

diskutil

I'm about to clone a MacBook Pro SSD directly to another MacBook Pro SSD. Just bought a Thundercable and Adapter to do so, so I spend 100 bucks on cables but it doesn't work :(

Both MacBook Pro have a 512 GB SSD.

The source Mac is booted in recovery mode and the source Mac isa started in disk target mode.

On the source Mac the "Macintosh HD" 354.9 GB are take, on the target Mac the "Macintosh HD" is empty.

Both have APFS volume in a disk container.

So I simply select the target volume and click restore select the source volume and go.

After pretty long time I get a not enough space error.

Checking with the diskutil cli I see, already 494.9 GB have been written to the target (it's the takes space on the volume space) but the source has just 354.9 GB. (See additional diskutil file)

I've no clue why the the restore disk task writes so much more data to the target than on the source exists.

This basically prevents me bringing my Mac to keyboard repair. Time Machine is no option, as a lot of important things (App licenses, App config like Little Snitch, Passwords, ...) are missing which I've to setup then by hand.

Posted on Jun 7, 2019 4:22 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,380 points

Posted on Jun 7, 2019 8:03 PM

I second Lexiepex's suggestion to use Carbon Copy Cloner. Unless both drives are from the same manufacturer and are the same exact model, then the actual usable space may not be exactly the same. I believe Disk Utility Restore does a block copy which requires the destination drive to be at least exactly equal in usable space. Carbon Copy Cloner creates new partitions to mimic the ones on the source drive and then copies the files to the destination volumes so you can actually use CCC to clone to a smaller destination drive. You can clone the booted system drive using CCC.

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Restore volume with diskutil, target gets bigger than source

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