John Gruber does a deep dive on the current state of bootable Mac cloning software in 2025. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a bootable backup drive for any of my machines, and while he recommends SuperDuper, I was always a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner. I used to diligently keep a bootable backup of my primary laptop, and kept another drive handy for catastrophic recovery back in the days when I was a freelance Mac support guy. With the switch to Intel and then to the Apple Silicon architectures (not to mention various flavors of OS and file systems) it got hard to stay current with all the required flavors needed. Apparently the last update of Sequoia blew everything up, but this was a bug and has now been rectified.
