But it's not designed to be backed up in the way that macOS 10.14 and earlier were, and even how Shirt Pocket (SuperDuper) and Bombich Software ( Carbon Copy Cloner) managed to get full Catalina backups working, too.Įssentially, a Big Sur system volume has to be installed on a freshly erased disk, because the process of making the seal is unique to each volume. The system and Data volumes together (bottom) appear as a seamless whole in the Finder.Īpple calls this a Sealed System Volume, and it's another layer of protection against both malware and other attempts to subvert your system to spy on you, corrupt your data, or exfiltrate personal information. The system volume isn't even mounted directly (middle), but uses a locked snapshot for even more security (lower left). In Big Sur, macOS is really a volume group of system, Data, and a few other partitions. Big Sur picked up on the system/Data volume division of Catalina, but added another layer: when installed or upgraded, macOS's system volume has a cryptographic wrapper around it that prevents the slighest modification without detection. (The Big Sur volume isn't even mounted directly, but as a read-only APFS snapshot, making it even harder for an attacker to find a way in.)īig Sur took that one step further in a way that affects your ability to continue to make backups of the style you might be accustomed to, and which requires a rethink for the present and future. The system volume is read-only and locked against modification during an active macOS session the Data volume can be read and written, and apps on its may be launched. With the concept of a volume group in APFS, Catalina organized all system files and core apps into one volume and all user-owned and user-modifiable data, third-party apps, and some Apple apps into another. This culminated in macOS 10.15 Catalina in splitting macOS into two pieces, which appear seamlessly as a single unit in the Finder, but which severed a long-time intermingling of files. Along the way, Apple kept adding more features to APFS.
APFS allowed more a sophisticated organization of aspects of macOS in the startup volume's partition. APFS first became mandatory for SSD-based Macs and then for ones with a Fusion drive. Apple splits the startup volume into two piecesĪpple phased in the process of changing how it organizes the startup volume through a phase in of the APFS (Apple File System).
#Chronosync not running when locked mac#
In this Mac 911 column, let's start with an explanation of why that is, so you understand exactly how difficult the task has become, and then proceed to the best new strategy. We might boot from the drive to keep on working, or use the files on the drive to restore our Mac quickly-a fast copy instead of a system reinstallation.īut it's a new world: Big Sur resists the ideas of a bootable external backup, though more particularly it resists easily updating an external copy of your startup volume's system files. In the past, many of us had bootable external drives, regularly updated, that we could use to start up our Macs in a pinch, such as when we had a drive failure or some kind of corruption or other problem that required wiping a disk altogether. It wasn't just a new number that came with Big Sur, finally turning macOS from 10.x to 11, but a new way of thinking about the difference between system files and your own data.
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