Cloning a Catalina System Volume?

[haralds]

Has anybody successfully cloned the system volume and its data container?

 

[haralds]

According to Mike Bombich the issue has not yet been resolved in CCC Beta.

 

[toru173]

I managed to clone the whole disk to an image, then just restored the container and it’s 5 volumes back to the same disk using disk utility. I’ve just finished ‘installing’ to a disk image directly to see if I can clone that to a physical disk. What errors are you getting?
[doublepost=1559911932][/doublepost]Interestingly, Catalina does not let me restore container to container, just whole disk (which failed) or individual volumes. High Sierra had no problem with restoring like this, and asr is pottering along fine.

 

[toru173]

Ok, I was able to successfully restore my ‘clean install’ image and boot it. ASR and disk utility definitely behave differently to my trusty old 10.13 version, but I don’t know if this will cause any issues moving forward

 

[haralds]

I managed to clone the whole disk to an image, then just restored the container and it’s 5 volumes back to the same disk using disk utility. I’ve just finished ‘installing’ to a disk image directly to see if I can clone that to a physical disk. What errors are you getting?
[doublepost=1559911932][/doublepost]Interestingly, Catalina does not let me restore container to container, just whole disk (which failed) or individual volumes. High Sierra had no problem with restoring like this, and asr is pottering along fine.

I presume you used Disk Utility for cloning and restoring?

 

[toru173]

I presume you used Disk Utiltilty for cloning and restoring?

Disk utility and asr, so block rather than file copy. I presume file copy won’t work unless we can figure out how to recreate the ‘firmlinks’ the installer sets up

 

[haralds]

I'll be waiting for Mike Bombich and CCC Beta to catch up. For now I use Time Machine for backup and SuperDuper for a non bootable clone for offline file recover.
Catalina is an optional boot on my systems, not the main running OS.

 

[JohnGregory]

How did you get Time Machine to backup Catalina? No matter what I do the current Time Machine shows up in the DO NOT BACKUP list and cannot be removed from the list. Therefore no Backup. Reformatting the TimeMachine Drive does not help. Renaming does not help. I have administrator authority to modify the Drive but I cannot get it to work! Getting desperate! Does anyone know how to do it?