A great advance in APFS which enables Big Sur’s Sealed System Volume, and backups being made to APFS. Here they’re fully explained.
SSV
The macOS 11.5.1 update fixes a serious vulnerability, but does it really take 2.2 GB (Intel) or 3.1 GB (M1) to fix what could only have been a few MB at most?
macOS 11.5 will be available in a few days. Should you risk upgrading? Here are some of the major issues which you need to consider when deciding and planning any upgrade.
Snapshots are designed to make it easy to roll back to a previous state. Why then can’t you use a snapshot to roll back to an earlier version of Big Sur?
macOS 11.2, 11.2.1 and 11.2.2 have come in quick succession. What do they tell us about how difficult it is to update Big Sur’s sealed System volume? Is this the way to go?
Although updating each M1 Mac requires 1 GB of direct download from Apple, there are great economies in running your own Content Caching Server. And why Apple doesn’t want to offer standalone Big Sur updates.
Detailed account of disk, volume and folder layouts on Big Sur’s boot disks, complete with roadmaps which are downloadable as PDFs.
Diagrams of the layout of volumes on boot disks for macOS 10.13 to 11, covering both Intel and M1 models.
It’s a commonplace task: make a bootable external disk for emergency use, containing your diagnostic and repair tools. On a new M1 Mac? Should be simple.
For all Macs running Big Sur, these now report whether its new System volume is correctly sealed, and about Platform Security for M1 Macs.
