Guys & Gals - just to be a 'luddite' in these major Apple transitions, i.e. Big Sur & M1 hardware, I've still not migrated my MBAir or my wife's 'new' iMac to Big Sur - the irritating number of updates to the macOS and the issues w/ M1 regarding CCC backups (which I use) have delayed my purchase of a new MI laptop to replace what I own and also going to Big Sur - not sure how much longer Apple will support my current Catalina OS but I'll be 'waiting in the wings' for these issues to sort out to my satisfaction - getting too old I guess to go through these almost weekly vexations - SORRY, just blowing off some steam. Dave
I understand, but let me tell you that my wife's new M1 mini is a screaming machine! The performance kick over her older Intel mini is astounding. As for CCC (and SD!), the only problem is that while you *can* create a bootable backup like you used to do, the architecture of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) in the M1 system means that the use case for a bootable backup is reduced. If you need to restore because of a data corruption that isn't hardware related, you can still do that. But if the M1 hardware fails, a bootable backup won't allow that M1 system to boot (logical when you think of it, the "drive" is integrated to the CPU/GPU/etc of the SoC and all of the "storage" is available to any and all processes when needed). In the Intel machines, unless the "drive" was soldered to the motherboard, you could have a drive fail and just boot from the external backup, then order a replacement drive and when it arrives, clone back from the external to the new internal and be back as it was. That swapping is not available in the SoC approach.
As for the frustration about how BS changed CCCs solution, that is not likely to go away soon, unless Apple really surprises me and fixes the
asr process that is broken. However, if you don't use Safety Net, it's relatively easy to "fix" the issue when you get a system upgrade by erasing the backup and doing a full new backup when the system does change. A bit of a PITA because of the time it takes, but functionally you end up in the same place. On an Intel machine with BS, you can boot externally just as you could before. On a new M1 system, you can boot externally, I have read, as long as the SoC doesn't have a failure. I haven't tried to boot from an external on my wife's M1 Mini as all she uses is TM for backups.
All of our Macs are on Big Sur. That's three Intel (2 x MBP, 1 mini) and one M1 mini. It's working well on all of them with all four using Time Machine and two of them using CCC.
