Oh, what to do if I don't have a secondary system? RecoveryOS resides in one of APFS Volumes in the container you want to image so this is not possible, I think (not tested). Better finish reading the article first.Ĭan I boot into RecoveryOS to do this DMG image? Before making image you might consider deleting all existing snapshots in all APFS Volumes in theĬontainer. You should see an available option to 'Image from container diskN'. It should have a name like 'container diskN' and none of its volumes should be currently mounted. And then right-click the whole APFS container containing your Left sidebar of Disk Utility.app switch to 'Show All Devices'. You must be booted into some other system than your main system. This can be done comfortably from Disk Utility.app. Source DMG must not contain any APFS Volume with APFS snapshots.

Play well with current Disk Utility.app, so you have to drop to command-line and force using legacy method of restoring the

' APFS Volume Groups', a new feature introduced in Catalina does not Source of restore operation must be a synthetised disk mounted from the DMG. There are major tricks how to make it work, the second one quite recent and third one is its consequence: Trick 1 This information is relevant for Catalina (I'm currently running macOS 10.15.1). it is possible to restore this DMG image into empty APFS container and get a bootable copy of the original system.Needed for complete restore (the DMG contains OS, OS Data, Preboot, Recovery and VM volumes) it is possible to create a DMG image from existing APFS container with macOS Catalina installation including metadata.This took way too many hours of my life I will never get back. I upgraded my late 2014 Mac Mini withĪ shiny new 1TB SSD. Today I wanted to move existing APFS-resident macOS Catalina installation to a new disk.

Imac clone hard drive to ssd