Up to macOS 10.15 Catalina, Mac users knew this: their boot volume was a single volume, as it appeared! (Okay, for users of Fusion drives, there are two physical drives managed by the software to appear as a single “disk drive,” but that is separate from the data organization that is a volume on a drive. )
As I wrote a few months ago, Apple relies on a feature of APFS (Apple File System) called “volume group”. This allows macOS to link two separate volumes together to appear as a single drive. Apple chose this method as a way to improve security, by placing system files read-only on one volume and your editable data, your home directory, your preference files, and everything else on another.
But where does it take you if you want clone your boot volume and create a backup that can be used as a one-stop shop to restore a failed disk or Mac, or that can be booted from? Fortunately, all of the software you need is up to date.
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Time Machine correctly archives your entire boot volume (as well as other volumes you could specify), allowing you to restore a Catalina drive as you would for a previous version of macOS.
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Carbon Copy Cloner ($ 40) supports the creation of complete clones that start with Catalina since August 2019. If you haven’t used CCC for a few years, you need version 5 to support Catalina.
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SuperDuper! ($ 28) released version 3.3 in November with full backup and startup support for Catalina. Its creator, Shirt Pocket Software, never charged for updates, so if you have a previous version, you can download and use the latest version.
This Mac 911 article answers a question from Macworld reader John.
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