Cloning a system disk from an M2 Pro MacBook Pro.
macOS 13.4.1, MacBook Pro M2 Pro.
Trying to clone the internal system disk to an external Thunderbolt 4 SSD disk using Disk Utility from the Recovery environment fails with "OSStatus error 22" (meaning, according to some articles on the net, that the source disk seal is broken). Only, the seal on the internal system disk is not broken: if it actually were, the internal system disk would refuse to boot, if I'm not mistaken. And the internal system disk boots fine.
Using SOS (in Disk Utility from the Recovery environment) on the internal system disk works fine too and reports no error, hence no repair.
Trying to clone the internal system disk with the cloning utility in Carbon Copy Cloner 6.1.6 works fine, does not report any error and produce an external clone that looks fine. Only trouble is that boot from this external clone will fail with no error message: after trying vainly to boot on the external SSD, the MacBook will eventually reboot from the internal system disk. To be fair to CCC, it warns the user that, to do this, it must use an Apple provided procedure that it has no control on, and the result of which it cannot warrant.
So, if you need an external boot disk, the only way to produce one will be to actually INSTALL the OS on the external disk, using the migration assistant to configure the new system with the configuration of the internal system disk (which also results in a disk where the users' internal IDs are different from those on the internal disk, I think). And this manipulation also takes well over twenty times more than cloning the disk.
Question: WHEN will Apple correct this? If I remember well, when Apple forced the users to move the system disk to APFS, it took THREE versions (i.e., THREE full years) before disk utility was able to clone an APFS system disk without miserably failing...
MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 2023)