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, bootable backup of your Mac.
> took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2.
Apple turning our devices into jail cells.
These tech titans need to be regulated. We should be able to install whatever we want on Mac, iPhone, and Android. To be able to back up whatever we want, install from web, not be forced to use app stores, not be forced to sync with the cloud, and not be forced to use first party software.
You are able to do and install what you want on a Mac (although for some things, you’d have to disable SIP), unlike on iOS.
I’m not the biggest fan of the grip Apple has on iOS, but this seems less of a case of platform protectionism, and more one of not wanting to (implicitly) support low-level interfaces/implicit APIs that are becoming hard to support for whatever reason.
Definitely annoying, but almost every OS does that at some point.
There is a technical reason that greatly benefits the user. The ability to guarantee the OS is unchanged, and to restore to factory defaults like on an iPhone are great benefits.
Regulations on our OSes means we end up with Microsoft refusing to limit access to the kernel not to displease the EU, which led to the Crowdstrike outage.
The EU objected to Microsoft having access to APIs that third party developers did not.
There has been no EU objection to creating new security APIs that would be accessable to Microsoft and third party developers.
As far as MacOS goes, you can't infect the system files with malware when the whole partition they live on cannot be modified by anything but the OS, which does indeed seem like a valid technical reason.
A point is being missed here; The user, nor the provider of hardware/software can be hostile towards each other.
Here's why:
The cloud is someone else's computer, not yours. It's a shared drawer that you get a key to, but so do many others. If our main access to your drawer is through the programs on our computer, it also can be limited and broken for hours, days, or weeks while under repair.
I'm not sure how many laptops you've owned (personal and work), it seems once people get past 5-10, we are basically buying the death of the device at the first moment we open a new laptop.
It's my device. I pay for it. I own it. I use it how I want.
Being protected from myself is fine. Being protected from external internet threats is fine.
Having a switch to bypass it is mandatory. Non negotiable. Instant deal breaker.
More realistically, MacOS is possibly * being shuttered, sequestered to get locked down to make adopting iOS / iPadOS type OS on the macbooks directly instead.
Windows tried to dictate when my computer should update and not do anything else, so I left. It's unforgivable. This was well before any policies to manage it cam eout.
There are many difficult technical and other important considerations and trade-offs and I think that Apple is answering them the majority of them as best it can. There are major benefits to having the kind of integration that Apple has, for example, the security chip and the wifi obviates theft of laptops and phones. You cannot get that with the traditional "PC starting from a boot partition" model. I lost a lot of respect for Apple when they seemingly limited the AirDrop sharing time coinciding with the protests against the government in China. I dread to think about what kind of compromises Tim Apple has made for the government of China, but then, there are many people who install and use TikTok voluntarily. It's fun to think about what if The Cloud™ was like a technoir IPFS running on top of peer-to-peer radio. You can make a decision to get out of your driveway huffing your new car's smell, and drive somewhere dirty with it.
You say this as though anyone buying a Macbook in the past decade reserves the right to be surprised. New Trump administration isn't going to budge on this - he's actually rather upset at the EU for how they've been treating his good friend Tim Apple. Chances are, he likes this lockdown and wants Americans to accept it.
If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. There is no government to save you, and no god Apple will answer to.
Having bootable backups was the only reason I ever moved to a Mac.
This means, a backup of my computer created using something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper backup when plugged into any other Mac, and it would boot as my computer. Also known as Target Disk Mode booting off this backup.
Indispensible when or if my laptop was in for repair with Apple.
TimeMachine is a pretty good second option. It's not bootable itself, but the recovery console on any mac can ingest a time machine backup and get you back up and running quite quickly. The benefit here is that it's free, trivial to setup, and very easy to keep running; Given an empty disk, plug it in, click one button, done.
Time Machine is OK as secondary, never primary, or the sole option.
Having Target Disc Mode and Target Display Mode on a Mac are two of probably the 4 reasons I switched to a Mac from Windows. Skitch was the other, and CC/SuperDuper was the 4th. I had tolerated my last windows laptop dying :)
Multiple copies of multiple types of backups is the only way.
I have always maintained a CarbonCopy/SuperDuper at all times, plus a Time Machine that I cared far less about. Time Machine is my desperate fall back.
Time Machine backups haven't always been super reliable, nor is the recovery time to restore acceptable. I'm sure it's gotten better, but enough for me to forget what it hasn't done in the past? Doubt it.
Time Machine is kind OK for set it and forget it backup to a NAS or something. I didn't find as much value in Time Machine to a dedicated external drive since it had the risk of being the only backup, and it's not a backup if there's only one copy. Time machine's limited utility of use when there is an emergency on an external drive, compared to SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner which is you are up in minutes not hours or days while you figure out what is going..
Having a Carbon Copy/Super Duper external drive sitting at one of your desks that's regularly plugged in gives you a live replica should anything happen.
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?
"Resource busy", as opposed to "this tool is no longer supported", almost certainly is a bug, and I don't read the blog post as implying otherwise.
But that doesn't mean it's not reckless of Apple to introduce a load-bearing component that wasn't necessary before and then not properly regression test it across OS updates.
It’s not a PR stunt at all. If there is any PR benefit, it is totally incidental and not at all planned.
The reality is that a core part of how the company’a product works is broken with the latest version. That means that customers of tools like Super Duper (and presumably also Carbon Copy Cloner) who rely on the tools for bootable backups need to potentially hold off on upgrading to 15.2. Considering that this is a tool a lot of Mac admins use, this is a thing you want to let people know about, if for no other reason than to reduce or try to anticipate support loads.
And unfortunately, filing Radars often doesn’t solve these sorts of issues. And the customer is always going to blame the third-party. So it is incumbent on the third-party to let people know the issue while at the same time, hopefully apply pressure through negative publicity to get the problem fixed.
Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work, but it absolutely does. And especially when it comes to changes that might be bugs (but could also be signs of feature removals), getting public sentiment on your side is often the only recourse third-party devs have.
Yes, that ensuing discussion could be PR as a side effect, but no respected third-party devs (certainly not ones as longstanding as the Super Duper folks) are using this as a marketing opportunity.
They just want their business to not suffer because of a bug they can’t control or fix.
Well, Apple has a super weird bug tracker that you can report stuff but you are kept super in the dark - I remember reporting Safari bugs in the early days of WASM and it was zero communication until the bug got fixed.
No, I used Radar in the pre-NeXT days. I even still have the state diagram mug from when it was introduced in the early 90s. At that point it was a client-server app, because the web didn’t exist yet.
Now, it may be that the Apple bug database is always called Radar, regardless of implementation, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Radar was always Apple, I think NeXT had their own issue tracker called Recall. However when I worked on Rhapsody in 1997 issues were tracked with Radar.
More of a tool that exists for 15 years or more, and is an important tool for some of us. When my mac broke down in, hmm, maybe 2010-ish, my superduper-created bootable clone allowed me to instantly continue my work on a freshly bought mac (just boot from the clone). No Apple utilities give you that.
Maybe if the target device is the same part number (I assume an m.2 NVMe), that would work. IDK if it works with other drives, e.g. different capacity, let alone using a USB-attached drive. I don't know what bits, beyond the image proper, belong to the trusted signed set.
It would just be a bit-for-bit copy, so maybe it would work? I don't know what a trusted signed set is.
I'm mystified about why I'm getting downvoted for that question. If it's inadvertently stupid of insulting to Apple users, wouldn't an explanation be more useful then trying to censor it?
Apple’s built-in backup solution is called Time
Machine. It was dogshit when it launched a decade ago, never got more reliable despite many OS releases, and is still largely dogshit.
The author of the blog makes an application that is very good at making backups on macOS and now their app is broken due to skullduggery by Apple.
So the issue is threefold: a) Apple further turning MascOS into iPhone, b) this harms competition, and c) users ultimately suffer because Apple has no incentive to get better.
> Time Machine is really quite good, all things considered.
This comment page is full of examples of very real issue with Time Machine which will bite you at some point if you use it. It’s not quite good. It’s bug riddled and Apple refuses to actually do the work to fix it because they would rather you buy iCloud.
Backup systems are both complex and very very critical to many people – of course there will be somebody running into every conceivable edge case.
But good or bad only make sense as evaluations relative to something. In my case, that's Linux (I never felt comfortable with any backup solution I looked at there while I was using it, especially not the Ubuntu built-in ones; maybe things have changed with btrfs now) and Windows, which doesn't even try (and all the third party ones I've looked at seem extremely shady in one way or another).
The fact that macOS has a pretty solid one out of the box is more than I'm expecting from an OS at this point. I've restored from it a couple of times, both the entire system and individual files, and it did exactly what I expected of it.
It appears “solid”, but the only test of a backup system is disaster recovery and I’ve had to attempt to get files from Time Machine drives before and it is hell.
iCloud Drive is also a bit iffy, it does a lot of weird shit with file meta data that can screw up file processing.
Some might think this is what the beta is for but I guess not. Let’s excuse the multi trillion dollar company for releasing broken software, each release being more broken than the previous one
> Apple broke the replicator.
What's the replicator?
> What this means is this: until Apple fixes the bug, you'll have to use "Backup - all files" with "Smart Update" to copy everything but the OS.
Use that where? Is that an option in some macOS tool?