Working with cloning drives running Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura you will need a machine that can run that software ideally a machine that can run the latest Ventura software. Without the latest update you will be restricted to working from the software your Mac is running. Within this article we are going to use a MacBook Air 2017 to clone Big Sur and Monterey (currently the air will only run Monterey) and a MacBook Pro 2018 running the latest version of Ventura.
The only other piece of software we are going to use is Carbon Copy Cloner version 6 (not 7) this will allow us to clone the external Operating System to another device (SSD)with easy. On a later article we will look at Super Duper and ChronoSync and run a comparison.
Additional to this is the hardware used to clone the Operating Systems. We will assume the working Bootable drive is in an ext drive type caddy which is sealed. For cloning to a SSD and for ease we are going to use a standard Ext Drive Caddy Doc which can take either 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives, loaded from the top and easy to swap over once the clone is complete. As for SSD your looking at again 128GB or 250GB you wont need anything higher than that.
Cloning the first two Operating systems are much the same as Catalina in its file structure. Using MacBook Air is a straight forward placing the ext Operating system we want to clone in the first folder with the new (SSD) in the clone category. Make sure like Catalina on the previous article make sure the new hard drive is formatted with the correct name you want for the drive. If not you will come up with the OS and Data drive partition problem naming the OS does not automatically name the data drive.
As for formatting the new drive (SSD) either APFS (Case-Sensitive) or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is fine. When you run the clone from Carbon Copy Cloner it will ask you to auto format the drive so it can build the recovery partition along with the OS and data partition. Remember any old data will be erased (lost to time forever) on the drive so check before clicking the clone button in Carbon Copy Cloner, once clicked you are committed (no going back). The clone can take anything from a few minutes to an hour depending on how big is the old drives data size. For a clean boot system the drive should not be massive I would expect no more than 40 – 80 GB. Anything outside of that there is clearly more data stored on the drive than a clean build system.
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