Full system clones now possible on M1 Macs

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woodmeister50 Author

Level 7

21,015 points

Full system clones now possible on M1 Macs

Apple has finally got their ASR utility working for

M1 Macs. This is the utility that is used to clone

the protected system volume. As a result.

Carbon Copy Cloner updated to support full system

clones of Big Sur on M1 Macs.

There is one caveat. There is still an issue with booting

some drives as it was before trying to boot any external

Big Sur install on an M1 Mac.

FWIW, tested on my known bootable external SSD and

there was an initial hiccup (CCC has documented a few

that can happen and their fixes) but the second shot works

and boots. So, I now have a complete bootable clone

of my internal system.

I thought I would post this as many were dismayed by the

fact that they could not do the clones on M1 Macs.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.3

Posted on May 17, 2021 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

woodmeister50 Author

Level 7

21,015 points

May 18, 2021 1:42 PM in response to lkrupp

The issue on M1 Macs initially was just trying to install Big Sur

on an external drive and booting it (and still is) unless you

have just the right drive and at that it may cease to boot

at some point. There were some pretty extensive threads

for a while on M1 Macs related to this.

I have a similar iMac to yours and never had any issue installing or booting

any macOS externally as long as it was supported by the late 2013 iMac.

The M1s however it can be quite the adventure. Example, T5 that you

mentioned and T7 would not boot with a USB-C cable but would

boot if you used a Thunderbolt3 cable.?????

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Answer 2

Owl-53

Level 10

102,439 points

May 18, 2021 7:31 AM in response to woodmeister50

Yes CCC 5.1.27 does the Full M1 Clone process

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Answer 3

May 18, 2021 8:15 AM in response to lkrupp

SuperDuper! has a beta version for this.

https://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/

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Answer 4

lkrupp

Level 7

22,189 points

May 18, 2021 9:20 AM in response to woodmeister50

Things have been wonky since Catalina. I bought an OWC Mercury HD (7200rpm) that wouldn’t boot no matter what from my late 2013 27” iMac 14,2 running Catalina. Upon the advice of SuperDuper developer I bought a Samsung T5 SSD and it boots just fine with the exception that the T5 must be the ONLY external drive mounted before it can be selected and booted from. Weird. Both CCC and SuperDuper support documents go into detail as to which drives will boot and which ones won’t. Apparently with some drives it’s the firmware, others not so much. Crapshoot.

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