No. of Recommendations: 3
I've been using SuperDuper for a long time to clone drives. I've never had any interest in TimeMachine and just like the idea of copying an entire drive. Easy to do, start it up late in the day and either in the morning or before I go to bed it is done.
I'll note that both of my iMacs are older Intel based ones.
Someone recently asked me if I could boot off the clone. I had tested that several years ago but not recently. I've made sure the files were copied and I could open them but didn't see a reason to test the boot since it wasn't a priority for me but decided why not test it again.
I went into Apple Settings and changed what drive to boot off of (I'm just using an external 1TB SSD) and restarted and it worked fine. Took some extra time but still worked. Then I switched back to the internal drive and disconnected the external drive and powered back up.
Well, that didn't work. Got into some loop of trying to boot, display a generated message about a problem with my system and repeated. First time in 20+ years of using Apple computers I've ever had this problem. I tried various keystrokes to boot into safe mode, recovery mode, etc. and nothing worked. In the back of my head I was thinking "I wonder if the keystrokes aren't working because I'm using a wireless/bluetooth keyboard".
That was an issue because it is hard to find a wired keyboard. I actually prefer them since I have no need for wireless mouse/keyboard on a desktop in my usage. I used to use a wired keyboard that I got over 20 years ago but unfortunately it stopped working after a long distance move. I started searching through my box of old Apple stuff and was fortunate to find a keyboard with a wire and plugged it in.
That did work. I first did a first aid on the hard drive to make sure it had no issues. Then I just went into reinstalling the OS. It took an hour or so but after that everything was fine and no data was damage or lost. I think I skipped reseting the NVRAM/PRAM which I should have done and maybe that would have fixed things quicker.
Anyhow, the lesson of this is that you really need to keep a wired keyboard around because when it has an issue like this, the system doesn't get to the point where it loads the drivers for bluetooth.
The only other issue I've ever had was that I skipped for a while on updates on an older iMac and then when I did the upgrade it seemed to stall for a long time but I left it alone for part of the day and came back and it was ready to go. I can't say my experiences with Windows over several decades of building, and using them daily have been as good. I do have a dual bootable Ubuntu/Windows10 system I built a while ago but I rarely use it.
Rich
No. of Recommendations: 1
Thanks.
Doesn't explain why I only had issues when I went back to booting off the internal drive.
I always do "Erase backup and then copy all" when using super duper. Having a bootable backup is nice but not essential for me. Personally I've never seen a point to time machine although if you use a Mac for work you might need backups with more detail. Most of my important stuff is also on the cloud (either Apple or Dropbox or both) so if I have to go back to a 2 month old backup I'm not losing any sleep over it.
For now all of my systems are still Intel based.
