Apple seems to be getting closer to fixing a bug that allows for third-party utilities to create bootable backup volumes.
Per SuperDuper! developer Dave Nainan, Apple’s recently-released macOS Sequoia 15.3 has corrected a problem that saw the SuperDuper! backup utility fail at a particular step in making a bootable copy of a drive. Nanian reported in December 2024 that the then-new macOS 15.2 had changed a feature called the Replicator.
Nainan posted that he thought the change might have been accidental. The bug, for its part, caused his app – and presumably other backup utilities – to fail. “Towards the end of replicating the Data volume,” he wrote, “seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error.”
Nainan recently posted to his Shirt Pocket Watch blog to cite that the issue had been resolved.
“Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator,” he writes. “As such, macOS copying will work again with ‘Erase, then copy’ backups [and] no update to SuperDuper is necessary.”
Nainan also stated that this “does not mean [that] boot from the [backup] copy will work in all situations.” The fix could imply that this specific failure has been repaired in macOS Sequoia 15.3, which indicates that this could be an error as opposed to an intentional roadblock.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via AppleInsider and Shirt Pocket Watch blog