Eric Strausser wrote:
Compromised meaning it won't boot, doesn't run or runs badly.
The operating system is on a cryptographically sealed, read-only volume. If you have a failure due to hardware, then booting from another hard drive will only make things worse. If you have a failure due to 3rd party system modifications, then your clone will likely be similarly affected.
It was a great system that only faltered when I got lazy and failed to run my daily clone updates.
The human is always the weakest link in backup systems.
enclosed systems are not Pro.
Whoever said they were? Anyone can slap a "Pro" moniker on a product for any number of reasons. Usually, it is just to distinguish a more expensive version of a similar product. Apple exclusively makes consumer electronics. They only use the word "Pro" so that people can purchase products that better conform to their own sense of identity.
My experience with macs tells me that the hard drive could experience complications short of eternal system wide death
First of all, there are no more "hard drives". There are high-speed, expensive, volatile RAM chips on the logic board. And then there are slightly-slower, slightly less expensive, higher-capacity, non-volatile RAM chips on the logic board.
the installed OS could suffer some issue that would make working difficult and therefore booting into the last known working OS state would fix my problems and let me get back to work.
I understand your concerns. You should also add the possibility of theft. I'm just saying that bootable clones are not a solution.
Urgent for me means that I have a spotting session in an hour. Or tonight at 10pm cuz the rest of the crew is in another time zone. My system becomes compromised in 1 of a million ways that a computer system can. I need to recover now. Not later. A working clone is the fastest way to do that.
Which is why I recommended a clone - of the entire computer. Forget the idea of bootable hard drives. That idea is dead.
iCloud does not work if you lose your internet connection
I wasn't suggesting that you download a complete new system over the internet. You won't do that in an hour. But iCloud will take advantage of your Internet connection while it is available and keep the computers in sync.
a system that is not allowed to be connected to the internet.
That's the easiest solution of all. Just add it to your requirements and have your IT contractor handle it. What will that cost $13, $14 million dollars? You can recoup those costs by finding a less expensive venue for the corporate Christmas gala.
Having a second computer as my backup seems like a new expensive solution that replaces an older much cheaper one.
As I said above, Apple exclusively makes consumer electronics. But that isn't the whole story. Apple exclusively makes high-end consumer electronics. Nobody buys Apple devices because they are cheap. A second computer solution is twice as good and twice as expensive.
Plus the old way of doing it also let me run different versions of the OS and swap between them.
You can do that with a second computer too. In fact, you really should already be doing that with your second computer. Ask any one of the people who were (past tense) processing 100+ FPS video with their macOS Ventura computers. When Apple broke that functionality, I advised those people that they should have a second computer for these types of issues, and that if they bought one today, it wouldn't have the latest update and they could get back to work right away. As you might expect, they generally weren't happy with that answer. They wanted a fix - NOW! I told them they would have to wait a couple of months. We're on week #7 now. 😄
I didn't need to buy a new computer just to try a new OS.
Oh yeah you do. 😄
I practice what I preach. When Sonoma came out, my previous test rig (2017 MBP) would no longer run it, so I had to buy a new one. I got a little ahead of myself and tried to install both Ventura and Sonoma, following Apple's published and supported instructions: Use more than one version of macOS on a Mac - Apple Support
Yeah, it didn't work. Back to the VM for me. Maybe I'll go all-in sometime late summer. The 2017 still runs Ventura. The 2021 production machine is happy on Monterey and won't upgrade until Apple forces me to.
The bootable clone way is a better cheaper way. I'd very much like to get back to that.
Sorry. Those days are over.
