12-01-2021, 12:40 AM
I have successfully made bootable Big Sur backups from Intel Macs onto various types of media with CCC. Piece of cake.
However, just today I used CCC 6 to back up to an external SSD with the "best effort" option on a Big Sur M1 Mac and failed to make it bootable.
After cloning, it took a bunch of extra steps to designate the SSD as a legit boot drive and ultimately it failed to boot because it couldn't authenticate the OS on the external with Apple's servers during the intermediate step where it ran off of the Recovery volume.
The error occurred because I didn't have an Ethernet connection handy and the Recovery system wouldn't let me join a WiFi network. I'm not sure when I'll have the opportunity to try this again on a ARM Mac, but I got close enough that I think the drive would have been bootable but for that network issue.
However, just today I used CCC 6 to back up to an external SSD with the "best effort" option on a Big Sur M1 Mac and failed to make it bootable.
After cloning, it took a bunch of extra steps to designate the SSD as a legit boot drive and ultimately it failed to boot because it couldn't authenticate the OS on the external with Apple's servers during the intermediate step where it ran off of the Recovery volume.
The error occurred because I didn't have an Ethernet connection handy and the Recovery system wouldn't let me join a WiFi network. I'm not sure when I'll have the opportunity to try this again on a ARM Mac, but I got close enough that I think the drive would have been bootable but for that network issue.