The developer of popular Mac utility Carbon Copy Cloner says that either macOS 10.15.5 has a bug that prevents the creation of bootable backups, or Apple has made a ‘reprehensible’ security decision …
Mike Bombich described the problem in a blog post.
He says that this is not an issue for most existing CCC users, as their existing bootable backups will continue to work and can continue to be updated.
And for anyone running macOS 10.15.5 who does need to create a fresh bootable backup, there is a workaround.
It’s therefore a trivial bug once you know it exists.
- Click the X button in the Destination selector box to clear the destination selection
- Click on the Destination selector and reselect your destination volume
CCC will then present new UI that will guide you through the procedure of creating a bootable backup
The problem, he says, is that creating the bootable backup will appear to have succeeded while actually failing. That’s either a horrible bug or a deliberate measure by Apple.
Could this simply be a security fix – maybe Apple doesn’t want third-parties to create firmlinks? If that’s the case – if this is not actually a bug and is actually an intentional change by Apple, then I would argue that this is far worse than a bug […]
Reporting success and failing is reprehensible. Last, and most important – making such a change in a production OS release with no warning is openly hostile to third-party developers who were relying on the documented functionality.
