How to Back up Catalina

[Gerry Yu]

I see Catalina has 2 "volumes": a catalina, and a Catalina data.
I wish to back up the "complete Catalina drive", do I just backup the catalina volume and not the catalina data volume, and it will do the trick?

Or do I need to back up both volumes?

Thanks.

[dnanian]

You need to use v3.3, which is Catalina compatible. That automatically backs up both volumes in the volume group.

[nephdoc]

The question actively being discussed on at least two Mac email forums is whether it's imperative that SuperDuper! clones on rotating platter hard drives MUST be to APFS-formatted drives, because APFS rotating platter drives are GLACIALLY slow as boot drives.

I'm not sure whether there's a Disk Utility default in Catalina when making a new external drive bootable that it be formatted APFS, or whether one can manually select HFS extended, and also whether an external drive formatted HFS extended can boot a T2-security chip equipped MacBook Pro can be used as a SuperDuper! clone.

Thanks so much,
Jim Robertson

[dnanian]

Catalina copies MUST be made to APFS volumes. There is no choice: HFS+ does not support volume groups.

[nephdoc]

Thanks so much. As an end user, it's relatively rare that a succinct explanation like that is something I understand easily, and I appreciate your patiently addressing my questions.

I tried to look up the answer myself in the pdf user guide, but it's a bit long in the tooth (recommends FW external drives as the ideal backup repository, and contains not a single mention of APFS), but it's obvious Apple has made creating clone type backups a moving target!

[dnanian]

It's more than the file system itself is a moving target - the transition from HFS+ to APFS was one, and now APFS to "volume group" APFS is another...