I booted into recovery, created a new blank encrypted sparseimage with a maximum size of 400GB, and then restored the data volume into the blank image. Today I attempted a slightly different strategy. Thus, there's no hardware explanation for why it would take 7 times longer to back up my new MacBook Pro compared to my old MacBook Pro. I have to use a USB-C to USB-A dongle from my new MacBook Pro, but that didn't slow down the copy speed at all. The limiting factor is just the speed of my backup HDD. I copied an identical multi-GB file from each MacBook Pro to my backup drive, and the copy durations were also identical, so there was no problem with that. The user interface was still responsive - there was no hang or spinning pinwheel - the Disk Utility app just doesn't provide cancel button!Īt that point I decided to do a speed test of my two MacBook Pros, Intel vs. The other ridiculous thing is that there was no way in Disk Utility to cancel the creation process. Only 50GB of the 350GB data had been saved to the new image.

When I got home, however, the backup wasn't even close to finished. I started the backup and went outside for an hour to get some exercise. I decided to just back up the read-write data volume and not the read-only system volume, because I didn't really need the latter, and skipping it would save time and space. So I booted into recovery and selected the /System/Volumes/Data folder. The suggested alternative is to create a 'New Image from Folder'. You can’t create images of APFS containers on Mac computers with Apple silicon or an Apple T2 Security Chip.' The documentation doesn't explain why, but… that sucks. According to Apple's support documentation, 'You can’t create images of individual APFS volumes. With my new Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, the 'New Image from' command is disabled for the internal disk container.

I don't need a bootable backup, I just need to protect against data loss, for example, when the Big Sur updater hosed my install. This works great, extremely reliable, never fails, and takes about an hour, so I can run the backup while I'm out for errands. With my 2014 Intel MacBook Pro, I can boot into the recovery volume, select the APFS container for the SSD, select the command 'New Image from' the container, and save a new encrypted, compressed disk image to my external backup drive. It's mostly been fine, but now I'm experiencing a significant problem: I can't figure out how to make a backup! I back up my home folder daily, and that continues to work as before, but I also back up the entire internal disk weekly, and that doesn't work. How do I backup my new MacBook Pro? Articles index How do I backup my new MacBook Pro? Apby Jeff JohnsonĪ few days ago I blogged about my new M1 MacBook Pro.

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