Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it’s the kind of thing that makes “this is easy” difficult to take seriously.
Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.
First, thank you for trying.
There’s what I want and there’s what I’m trying to do. 😉
Waving my magic wand, I’d like a bootable backup of my laptop’s internal hard drive. This is what SuperDuper does. I would like it to be straightforward: I issue one command, then I can boot from the external hard disk to which I have backed up. For bonus points, restore is merely backup in the other direction.
That is what I’d like.
I’m cloning a drive with Clonezilla and tomorrow I’ll try to boot to the backup drive. I would like to understand how restore works, but frankly, I’m not optimistic and I’m not currently eager to risk screwing up my laptop’s internal hard disk.
How curious.
I am now trying my first backup. There were extra steps and I think I did it correctly, but the web site inundated me with details in a way that Shirt Pocket did not do with SuperDuper.
I haven’t used Mac OS regularly since about 2018, so I take you at your word that backing up isn’t as easy on Mac OS as it used to be.
With any luck, this just works. There is room for a simpler and gentler introduction to this. Maybe I can publish one.
Easy? Is this the kind of easy that’s “easy once you understand”?
I want to be able to back up, not earn an undergraduate degree in how to back up.
Yes, but to folks accustomed to using SuperDuper to create bootable backups, it does not seem so straightforward.
I can still speak vim, but I drive helix daily.
Imagine vim designed today.
Ugh. No. I still don’t know how to just boot this backup. When I try it in an older laptop, the keyboard and trackpad stop working once I log in. I presume this is a hardware driver problem. Presumably that’s unavoidable.
I am, of course, not eager to screw up the BIOS settings on my daily laptop.
I couldn’t figure out how to boot the cloned drive in a VirtualBox VM. The tutorials seem to assume that I have a virtual disk image or enough internal hard disk space to copy the cloned drive locally in order to run it locally. That defeats the purpose.
So I’m stuck. If I can’t just boot to the USB external drive because of UUID clashes, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to have gained by cloning my laptop’s internal hard disk. I have a backup that I can’t safely boot to. 🤷
I continue to be grateful to anyone willing to try to help me understand how to do this. It’s literally the only thing that stops me from feeling 100% comfortable with a Linux distribution as my everyday OS. I feel like I’ve been living with a ticking timebomb for the past eight years.
UPDATE: I booted to Pop!_OS, then used
chroot, but this is not what I was expecting.