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This is from the SuperDuper backup folks. SuperDuper is a tool that you can use to make bootable backups of your macOS system. Apple took away the ability for 3

by a2tech 2y ago

This is from the SuperDuper backup folks. SuperDuper is a tool that you can use to make bootable backups of your macOS system. Apple took away the ability for 3rd party tools to manipulate the OS and copy it to another partition/drive and took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2. So that breaks SuperDuper's ability to make a nice, clean, bootable backup of your Mac.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sam1r 2y ago
Is this something intentional that Apple has publicly stated in some realm? AFAIK, in that case, maybe it's just a bug that they're planning to fix...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sam1r 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - chris_wot 2y ago
    Oh, my heart bleeds for Apple.
  - a1o 2y ago
    Well, Apple has a super weird bug tracker that you can report stuff but you are kept super in the dark - I remember reporting Safari bugs in the early days of WASM and it was zero communication until the bug got fixed.
    - zeusk 2y ago
      It’s probably that they don’t want to risk leak any internal discussion. The information from the public "tracker" is just forwarded to the internal Radar and that's a one-way street.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      it's called radar I believe and they've used it for a long long time. I always assumed it was built completely in house in the before times
      - threeseed 2y ago
        I worked at Apple a while ago and it was a WebObjects app. So I would bet that it was built at NeXT and brought across. It's in the archive going back to 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991009144258/http://bugreport.apple.com/radarweb35/tafs/includes/RadarHelpMain.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991009144258/http://bugreport....
        wrs 2y ago
        No, I used Radar in the pre-NeXT days. I even still have the state diagram mug from when it was introduced in the early 90s. At that point it was a client-server app, because the web didn’t exist yet. Now, it may be that the Apple bug database is always called Radar, regardless of implementation, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
        lukeh 2y ago
        Radar was always Apple, I think NeXT had their own issue tracker called Recall. However when I worked on Rhapsody in 1997 issues were tracked with Radar.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    A new service that quite literally does not work right now because Apple broke the APIs they need?
    - radiospiel 2y ago
      More of a tool that exists for 15 years or more, and is an important tool for some of us. When my mac broke down in, hmm, maybe 2010-ish, my superduper-created bootable clone allowed me to instantly continue my work on a freshly bought mac (just boot from the clone). No Apple utilities give you that.
  - filmgirlcw 2y ago
    It’s not a PR stunt at all. If there is any PR benefit, it is totally incidental and not at all planned. The reality is that a core part of how the company’a product works is broken with the latest version. That means that customers of tools like Super Duper (and presumably also Carbon Copy Cloner) who rely on the tools for bootable backups need to potentially hold off on upgrading to 15.2. Considering that this is a tool a lot of Mac admins use, this is a thing you want to let people know about, if for no other reason than to reduce or try to anticipate support loads. And unfortunately, filing Radars often doesn’t solve these sorts of issues. And the customer is always going to blame the third-party. So it is incumbent on the third-party to let people know the issue while at the same time, hopefully apply pressure through negative publicity to get the problem fixed. Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work, but it absolutely does. And especially when it comes to changes that might be bugs (but could also be signs of feature removals), getting public sentiment on your side is often the only recourse third-party devs have. Yes, that ensuing discussion could be PR as a side effect, but no respected third-party devs (certainly not ones as longstanding as the Super Duper folks) are using this as a marketing opportunity. They just want their business to not suffer because of a bug they can’t control or fix.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work That was actually from the 2010 App Store Review Guidelines: "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."
- brigade 2y ago
  Which part? The inability for 3rd parties to create bootable images instead of using Apple-signed tools? Because that was 4 years ago and is kind of a fundamental requirement for the chain of trust needed for signed system volume security introduced back then. Or are you arguing that this blog post is wrong in asserting the OS release this week introduced a bug in those tools?
  - result2vino 2y ago
    Arguing? Christ. Is that what we call “stating that it’s possible that…”. Not everything is a hill to die on.
- lxgr 2y ago
  "Resource busy", as opposed to "this tool is no longer supported", almost certainly is a bug, and I don't read the blog post as implying otherwise. But that doesn't mean it's not reckless of Apple to introduce a load-bearing component that wasn't necessary before and then not properly regression test it across OS updates.
incompatible 2y ago
Maybe boot a Linux USB drive and use dd to copy the drive? I assume this is too easy, but I'm curious about where it fails.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Maybe if the target device is the same part number (I assume an m.2 NVMe), that would work. IDK if it works with other drives, e.g. different capacity, let alone using a USB-attached drive. I don't know what bits, beyond the image proper, belong to the trusted signed set.
  - incompatible 2y ago
    It would just be a bit-for-bit copy, so maybe it would work? I don't know what a trusted signed set is. I'm mystified about why I'm getting downvoted for that question. If it's inadvertently stupid of insulting to Apple users, wouldn't an explanation be more useful then trying to censor it?
    - nunez 2y ago
      Is it possible to boot a Linux Live CD on Apple Silicon Macs?
      - incompatible 2y ago
        I think Linux runs on Apple hardware? I could be out of date, and it's completely locked-down these days. Edit: I suppose it could explain the downvoting. "Apple doesn't let us boot Linux, you insensitive clod!"
echelon 2y ago
> took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2. Apple turning our devices into jail cells. These tech titans need to be regulated. We should be able to install whatever we want on Mac, iPhone, and Android. To be able to back up whatever we want, install from web, not be forced to use app stores, not be forced to sync with the cloud, and not be forced to use first party software.
- lxgr 2y ago
  You are able to do and install what you want on a Mac (although for some things, you’d have to disable SIP), unlike on iOS. I’m not the biggest fan of the grip Apple has on iOS, but this seems less of a case of platform protectionism, and more one of not wanting to (implicitly) support low-level interfaces/implicit APIs that are becoming hard to support for whatever reason. Definitely annoying, but almost every OS does that at some point.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Apple turning our devices into jail cells. > These tech titans need to be regulated. You say this as though anyone buying a Macbook in the past decade reserves the right to be surprised. New Trump administration isn't going to budge on this - he's actually rather upset at the EU for how they've been treating his good friend Tim Apple. Chances are, he likes this lockdown and wants Americans to accept it. If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. There is no government to save you, and no god Apple will answer to.
  - beretguy 2y ago
    > If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. I use iPhone because I try not to use any Google products. I didn't sign up for no nothing, I have no other choice.
    - rahkiin 2y ago
owlbite 2y ago
Do we know if this was a bug in the beta releases of 15.2, or did it manifest only in the final version?
j45 2y ago
I wonder if Carbon Copy Cloner is affected. Having bootable backups was the only reason I ever moved to a Mac. This means, a backup of my computer created using something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper backup when plugged into any other Mac, and it would boot as my computer. Also known as Target Disk Mode booting off this backup. Indispensible when or if my laptop was in for repair with Apple.
- cosmotic 2y ago
  TimeMachine is a pretty good second option. It's not bootable itself, but the recovery console on any mac can ingest a time machine backup and get you back up and running quite quickly. The benefit here is that it's free, trivial to setup, and very easy to keep running; Given an empty disk, plug it in, click one button, done.
  - j45 2y ago
    Time Machine is OK as secondary, never primary, or the sole option. Having Target Disc Mode and Target Display Mode on a Mac are two of probably the 4 reasons I switched to a Mac from Windows. Skitch was the other, and CC/SuperDuper was the 4th. I had tolerated my last windows laptop dying :) Multiple copies of multiple types of backups is the only way. I have always maintained a CarbonCopy/SuperDuper at all times, plus a Time Machine that I cared far less about. Time Machine is my desperate fall back. Time Machine backups haven't always been super reliable, nor is the recovery time to restore acceptable. I'm sure it's gotten better, but enough for me to forget what it hasn't done in the past? Doubt it. Time Machine is kind OK for set it and forget it backup to a NAS or something. I didn't find as much value in Time Machine to a dedicated external drive since it had the risk of being the only backup, and it's not a backup if there's only one copy. Time machine's limited utility of use when there is an emergency on an external drive, compared to SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner which is you are up in minutes not hours or days while you figure out what is going.. Having a Carbon Copy/Super Duper external drive sitting at one of your desks that's regularly plugged in gives you a live replica should anything happen. Time Machine has it's own history of issues: https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+backup+issues https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+backup+issues

by a2tech 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sam1r 2y ago

Is this something intentional that Apple has publicly stated in some realm? AFAIK, in that case, maybe it's just a bug that they're planning to fix...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sam1r 2y ago
[flagged]
- chris_wot 2y ago
  Oh, my heart bleeds for Apple.
- a1o 2y ago
  Well, Apple has a super weird bug tracker that you can report stuff but you are kept super in the dark - I remember reporting Safari bugs in the early days of WASM and it was zero communication until the bug got fixed.
  - zeusk 2y ago
    It’s probably that they don’t want to risk leak any internal discussion. The information from the public "tracker" is just forwarded to the internal Radar and that's a one-way street.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    it's called radar I believe and they've used it for a long long time. I always assumed it was built completely in house in the before times
    - threeseed 2y ago
      I worked at Apple a while ago and it was a WebObjects app. So I would bet that it was built at NeXT and brought across. It's in the archive going back to 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991009144258/http://bugreport.apple.com/radarweb35/tafs/includes/RadarHelpMain.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991009144258/http://bugreport....
      - wrs 2y ago
        No, I used Radar in the pre-NeXT days. I even still have the state diagram mug from when it was introduced in the early 90s. At that point it was a client-server app, because the web didn’t exist yet. Now, it may be that the Apple bug database is always called Radar, regardless of implementation, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
        lukeh 2y ago
        Radar was always Apple, I think NeXT had their own issue tracker called Recall. However when I worked on Rhapsody in 1997 issues were tracked with Radar.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  A new service that quite literally does not work right now because Apple broke the APIs they need?
  - radiospiel 2y ago
    More of a tool that exists for 15 years or more, and is an important tool for some of us. When my mac broke down in, hmm, maybe 2010-ish, my superduper-created bootable clone allowed me to instantly continue my work on a freshly bought mac (just boot from the clone). No Apple utilities give you that.
- filmgirlcw 2y ago
  It’s not a PR stunt at all. If there is any PR benefit, it is totally incidental and not at all planned. The reality is that a core part of how the company’a product works is broken with the latest version. That means that customers of tools like Super Duper (and presumably also Carbon Copy Cloner) who rely on the tools for bootable backups need to potentially hold off on upgrading to 15.2. Considering that this is a tool a lot of Mac admins use, this is a thing you want to let people know about, if for no other reason than to reduce or try to anticipate support loads. And unfortunately, filing Radars often doesn’t solve these sorts of issues. And the customer is always going to blame the third-party. So it is incumbent on the third-party to let people know the issue while at the same time, hopefully apply pressure through negative publicity to get the problem fixed. Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work, but it absolutely does. And especially when it comes to changes that might be bugs (but could also be signs of feature removals), getting public sentiment on your side is often the only recourse third-party devs have. Yes, that ensuing discussion could be PR as a side effect, but no respected third-party devs (certainly not ones as longstanding as the Super Duper folks) are using this as a marketing opportunity. They just want their business to not suffer because of a bug they can’t control or fix.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > Phil Schiller (Apple’s head of marketing and the App Store) once said that “running to the press” doesn’t work That was actually from the 2010 App Store Review Guidelines: "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."
brigade 2y ago
Which part? The inability for 3rd parties to create bootable images instead of using Apple-signed tools? Because that was 4 years ago and is kind of a fundamental requirement for the chain of trust needed for signed system volume security introduced back then. Or are you arguing that this blog post is wrong in asserting the OS release this week introduced a bug in those tools?
- result2vino 2y ago
  Arguing? Christ. Is that what we call “stating that it’s possible that…”. Not everything is a hill to die on.
lxgr 2y ago
"Resource busy", as opposed to "this tool is no longer supported", almost certainly is a bug, and I don't read the blog post as implying otherwise. But that doesn't mean it's not reckless of Apple to introduce a load-bearing component that wasn't necessary before and then not properly regression test it across OS updates.

incompatible 2y ago

Maybe boot a Linux USB drive and use dd to copy the drive? I assume this is too easy, but I'm curious about where it fails.

nine_k 2y ago
Maybe if the target device is the same part number (I assume an m.2 NVMe), that would work. IDK if it works with other drives, e.g. different capacity, let alone using a USB-attached drive. I don't know what bits, beyond the image proper, belong to the trusted signed set.
- incompatible 2y ago
  It would just be a bit-for-bit copy, so maybe it would work? I don't know what a trusted signed set is. I'm mystified about why I'm getting downvoted for that question. If it's inadvertently stupid of insulting to Apple users, wouldn't an explanation be more useful then trying to censor it?
  - nunez 2y ago
    Is it possible to boot a Linux Live CD on Apple Silicon Macs?
    - incompatible 2y ago
      I think Linux runs on Apple hardware? I could be out of date, and it's completely locked-down these days. Edit: I suppose it could explain the downvoting. "Apple doesn't let us boot Linux, you insensitive clod!"

echelon 2y ago

> took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2. Apple turning our devices into jail cells. These tech titans need to be regulated. We should be able to install whatever we want on Mac, iPhone, and Android. To be able to back up whatever we want, install from web, not be forced to use app stores, not be forced to sync with the cloud, and not be forced to use first party software.

lxgr 2y ago
You are able to do and install what you want on a Mac (although for some things, you’d have to disable SIP), unlike on iOS. I’m not the biggest fan of the grip Apple has on iOS, but this seems less of a case of platform protectionism, and more one of not wanting to (implicitly) support low-level interfaces/implicit APIs that are becoming hard to support for whatever reason. Definitely annoying, but almost every OS does that at some point.
talldayo 2y ago
> Apple turning our devices into jail cells. > These tech titans need to be regulated. You say this as though anyone buying a Macbook in the past decade reserves the right to be surprised. New Trump administration isn't going to budge on this - he's actually rather upset at the EU for how they've been treating his good friend Tim Apple. Chances are, he likes this lockdown and wants Americans to accept it. If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. There is no government to save you, and no god Apple will answer to.
- beretguy 2y ago
  > If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. I use iPhone because I try not to use any Google products. I didn't sign up for no nothing, I have no other choice.
  - rahkiin 2y ago

owlbite 2y ago

Do we know if this was a bug in the beta releases of 15.2, or did it manifest only in the final version?

j45 2y ago

I wonder if Carbon Copy Cloner is affected. Having bootable backups was the only reason I ever moved to a Mac. This means, a backup of my computer created using something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper backup when plugged into any other Mac, and it would boot as my computer. Also known as Target Disk Mode booting off this backup. Indispensible when or if my laptop was in for repair with Apple.

cosmotic 2y ago
TimeMachine is a pretty good second option. It's not bootable itself, but the recovery console on any mac can ingest a time machine backup and get you back up and running quite quickly. The benefit here is that it's free, trivial to setup, and very easy to keep running; Given an empty disk, plug it in, click one button, done.
- j45 2y ago
  Time Machine is OK as secondary, never primary, or the sole option. Having Target Disc Mode and Target Display Mode on a Mac are two of probably the 4 reasons I switched to a Mac from Windows. Skitch was the other, and CC/SuperDuper was the 4th. I had tolerated my last windows laptop dying :) Multiple copies of multiple types of backups is the only way. I have always maintained a CarbonCopy/SuperDuper at all times, plus a Time Machine that I cared far less about. Time Machine is my desperate fall back. Time Machine backups haven't always been super reliable, nor is the recovery time to restore acceptable. I'm sure it's gotten better, but enough for me to forget what it hasn't done in the past? Doubt it. Time Machine is kind OK for set it and forget it backup to a NAS or something. I didn't find as much value in Time Machine to a dedicated external drive since it had the risk of being the only backup, and it's not a backup if there's only one copy. Time machine's limited utility of use when there is an emergency on an external drive, compared to SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner which is you are up in minutes not hours or days while you figure out what is going.. Having a Carbon Copy/Super Duper external drive sitting at one of your desks that's regularly plugged in gives you a live replica should anything happen. Time Machine has it's own history of issues: https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+backup+issues https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+backup+issues