I strive for clarity in everyday communication, but reserve the right to play when ambiguity is easily tolerable. I try to make life easier for second-language speakers in English and I appreciate it when they do the same for me in their language.

It’s a joke: they’d never return a sensible exit code.

Ugh. No. I still don’t know how to just boot this backup. When I try it in an older laptop, the keyboard and trackpad stop working once I log in. I presume this is a hardware driver problem. Presumably that’s unavoidable.

I am, of course, not eager to screw up the BIOS settings on my daily laptop.

I couldn’t figure out how to boot the cloned drive in a VirtualBox VM. The tutorials seem to assume that I have a virtual disk image or enough internal hard disk space to copy the cloned drive locally in order to run it locally. That defeats the purpose.

So I’m stuck. If I can’t just boot to the USB external drive because of UUID clashes, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to have gained by cloning my laptop’s internal hard disk. I have a backup that I can’t safely boot to. 🤷

I continue to be grateful to anyone willing to try to help me understand how to do this. It’s literally the only thing that stops me from feeling 100% comfortable with a Linux distribution as my everyday OS. I feel like I’ve been living with a ticking timebomb for the past eight years.

UPDATE: I booted to Pop!_OS, then used chroot, but this is not what I was expecting.

Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it’s the kind of thing that makes “this is easy” difficult to take seriously.

Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.

First, thank you for trying.

There’s what I want and there’s what I’m trying to do. 😉

Waving my magic wand, I’d like a bootable backup of my laptop’s internal hard drive. This is what SuperDuper does. I would like it to be straightforward: I issue one command, then I can boot from the external hard disk to which I have backed up. For bonus points, restore is merely backup in the other direction.

That is what I’d like.

I’m cloning a drive with Clonezilla and tomorrow I’ll try to boot to the backup drive. I would like to understand how restore works, but frankly, I’m not optimistic and I’m not currently eager to risk screwing up my laptop’s internal hard disk.

How curious.

I am now trying my first backup. There were extra steps and I think I did it correctly, but the web site inundated me with details in a way that Shirt Pocket did not do with SuperDuper.

I haven’t used Mac OS regularly since about 2019, so I take you at your word that backing up isn’t as easy on Mac OS as it used to be.

With any luck, this just works. There is room for a simpler and gentler introduction to this. Maybe I can publish one.

Easy? Is this the kind of easy that’s “easy once you understand”?

I want to be able to back up, not earn an undergraduate degree in how to back up.

Yes, but to folks accustomed to using SuperDuper to create bootable backups, it does not seem so straightforward.

Exactly. Designs are tangled, causing unexpected explosions in the next building. And when I invite programmers to create less-tangled designs, they scoff and call it “overengineering”.

And then another explosion in the next building.

🤷

(This isn’t the only cause/effect path leading to unexpected defects, but it’s a very common one.)

Folks like the idea of being a vigilante, but once you have a taste for using violence to get your way…

Possible, but not popular, and therefore strange. Because strange, rare. Because rare, strange. Repeat.

Torsk på Tallinn.

I’d love to tell you, but…

Hofstadter, Le ton beau de Marot. For anyone who wants to read deeply about this kind of translation problem.

Well, we fixed it in enough important places before the deadline! And even in many unimportant places.

A mobile phone is a kind of computer.

Protocols help computers know how to behave together. It’s like how you know that you make your voice go up to ask a question, so that I know I’m supposed to answer you.

Count the "r"s in the word “strawberry”.

It just answered 2.

People want connexion. What they (tend to) get is a thin facsimile. Real connexion feels wonderful to me. Superficial, forced social performance feels awful to me. For example, I get nothing from small talk. Either talk about something real with me or go about your day.

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