clone the Catalina installer

[MCEStaff]

So google will easily find plenty of posts/articles/how-tos about "Creating a Catalina USB installer" and "Cloning your Catalina installation".
What I'm looking for though is a way to clone the installer I've already created (so a friend won't ask to borrow mine).
Simply going into Disk Utility and using the 'Image' function doesn't seem to work, even if I 'erase' the target disk (formatting it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is what my source disk shows as). Yes I've tried selecting "Show all Devices".
I'm about to try booting from the installer but I feel like I've run into this a few months back and just created a new one from scratch instead.

Thanks folks.

 

[chrfr]

So google will easily find plenty of posts/articles/how-tos about "Creating a Catalina USB installer" and "Cloning your Catalina installation".
What I'm looking for though is a way to clone the installer I've already created (so a friend won't ask to borrow mine).
Simply going into Disk Utility and using the 'Image' function doesn't seem to work, even if I 'erase' the target disk (formatting it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is what my source disk shows as). Yes I've tried selecting "Show all Devices".
I'm about to try booting from the installer but I feel like I've run into this a few months back and just created a new one from scratch instead.

Thanks folks.

Do you mean you made a bootable USB installer and want to clone that to another USB drive? It'd be preferable to just follow the process to make a second USB installer rather than clone the one you have. That way you're following a totally supported workflow, and it won't take any longer.

 

[MCEStaff]

I've caught one mistake. My installer is on a 32G flash and my target is 16G. Now I don't see any way to shrink the partition on the installer.
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Do you mean you made a bootable USB installer and want to clone that to another USB drive? It'd be preferable to just follow the process to make a second USB installer rather than clone the one you have. That way you're following a totally supported workflow, and it won't take any longer.

Well I think making the installer from scratch will take longer than cloning one. Plus I need the downloaded installer in my applications folder.

 

[MCEStaff]

I'm creating an image file now from the working installer. Hopefully it will only use the 8gb or so it needs or it will let me resize the image afterwards.
I guess to be complete I'll have to try cloning this working installer to a 32GB drive to see if it's as simple as it should be.

 

[chrfr]

I've caught one mistake. My installer is on a 32G flash and my target is 16G. Now I don't see any way to shrink the partition on the installer.
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Well I think making the installer from scratch will take longer than cloning one. Plus I need the downloaded installer in my applications folder.

It will be faster to make a new installer. To clone, you have to read the entirety of your USB drive, then write it. To make the new installer, you only have to write.

 

[MCEStaff]

It will be faster to make a new installer. To clone, you have to read the entirety of your USB drive, then write it. To make the new installer, you only have to write.

Well any filesystem-aware system (like Apple's Disk Utility) should be able to do a file-by-file clone rather than a block-by-block so it doesn't have to read the entire drive and then write the entire drive. It only has to read and write occupied space. Note that both will happen almost simultaneously as well so it's not "read the entire drive" followed by "write the entire drive". It should take approximately the amount of time it would take to simple write the files... a few milliseconds more to partition the drive and begin the read process on the source.

Creating the installer seems to take a long time, I assume it's file extraction time slowing it down but that's just a gut feeling, never tested.

 

[chrfr]

Well any filesystem-aware system (like Apple's Disk Utility) should be able to do a file-by-file clone rather than a block-by-block so it doesn't have to read the entire drive and then write the entire drive. It only has to read and write occupied space. Note that both will happen almost simultaneously as well so it's not "read the entire drive" followed by "write the entire drive". It should take approximately the amount of time it would take to simple write the files... a few milliseconds more to partition the drive and begin the read process on the source.

Creating the installer seems to take a long time, I assume it's file extraction time slowing it down but that's just a gut feeling, never tested.

How much time have you spent trying to make cloning work? A new USB installer would have been done by now.

 

[Sharewaredemon]

How much time have you spent trying to make cloning work? A new USB installer would have been done by now.

Nuke and pave, always the fastest way.
I keep installers on an external and fire them into the Apps folder any time I need to make a key for someone.

 

[MCEStaff]

It looks like SuperDuper was able to do it.

That's a bummer. I want to do it with the built-in Apple tools.

Maybe I'll have more time to try this out later. Right now I'm just using a customer's MBAir.