Moving my cloned Mac desktop to a MacBook using a usb

Thanks very much for your reply. I will try to provide you with more information. Both machines operate Big Sur 11.4. I tried copying the clone to a blank Macbook HD (1 TB) but the Macbook did not recognize the drive. I used a clone from Sync Folders + and then Super!Duper! (free version) and was unable to choose drives at startup (option key down at boot up). I assumed that somehow the cloning process was not done correctly. Super!Duper! is as simple as it gets but that failed as well. I want to have a clone of my Mac desktop in case of catastrophic failure (not as likely as in Windows machines, but still possible), so getting the hang of this is important to me. I do regular backups, but not a clone or what used to be called "disk image". I am baffled as to why I can't get this work. Any thoughts would be appreicated.

OK that is great and I will try it before I buy anything. Obviously I have the Mac OD on the desktop machine. The new drive is blank but formatted ADFS. Doesn't the clone include the MacOS? Sounds like I have to install the OS then add the clone? Am I mistaken? I am going to the CC site now to investigate, thanks for the tip.

Phil, the CC Clone took about 2 hours to create a clone (about half the time of other software. I selected the USB drive at startup and halfway through the boot up I got a circle with line through it. I have the trial version but is there a support site so I can figure out why it won't boot with the USB Clone? Thanks for all of your help and I don't want to pester you so this will be my last ask.

I received a reply today. I am a bit confused by the reply as I was under the impression that a "clone" was a photograph of my HD at a moment in time, and viewed it as the ultimate recovery tool as I could pick up in the exact same spot as I was at that point. No installing apps, etc. I do regular backups for documents, by to me a clone was the gold standard. Seems as if Mike is suggesting otherwise. Here it is for you to see and maybe I just am misguided in my expectations and missing some brain cells on the whole process.

Hi Murray,

We welcome feedback on making backups bootable with CCC, but we cannot offer in-depth troubleshooting assistance for problems that Apple's replication utility encounters, nor can we offer any troubleshooting assistance for the bootability of the destination device beyond the suggestions offered in our External Boot Troubleshooting kbase article.

In general, we're planning to rely less and less on the bootability of the backup volume for recovery from hardware failure. You don't have to be able to boot your Mac from the CCC backup to restore data from it. You can restore individual files and folders using Finder or CCC while booted from your production volume, and you can also recover older versions of files from CCC snapshots. If you ever needed to restore everything from a non-bootable backup, you would install macOS via Recovery mode (e.g. onto a replacement disk), then migrate data from the CCC backup via Migration Assistant. CCC backups are compatible with Migration Assistant, and we support that configuration.

Mike

Mike Bombich

Bombich Software, Inc.

Thanks, I have gained some insights into this whole process and realize now that it is much more complex than I bargained for. God bless Apple for protecting privacy but sometimes they have created roadblocks for the authorized owner, and my plan seems to be a bridge too far. I used to do this when I was in the Windows world, and that could be tricky as well, mostly pertaining to partition requirements, but now with Big Sur, this thing has gotten messy. I really appreciate how much time you put into my situation and I can't thank you enough for all of your help. I stick with regular backups and the migration tool once I move to a newer device. I will say the clone software from CC was really impressive, and by far the easiest of the products I sampled. Best regards.

sent them a note thanks Phil

will do