Can't downgrade 16" MBP from Monterey to Catalina with Carbon Copy Cloner due to bad Bombich instructions, help!

[tomekinc]

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 1.0 TB disk0s2



/dev/disk1 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk1

Physical Store disk0s2

1: APFS Volume Untitled - Data 761.9 KB disk1s1



/dev/disk2 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1

2: Apple_APFS Container disk4 1.0 TB disk2s2

3: Apple_APFS Container disk3 1.0 TB disk2s3



/dev/disk3 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk3

Physical Store disk2s3

1: APFS Volume Secondary Backup - Data 183.5 GB disk3s1

2: APFS Volume Secondary Backup 12.8 GB disk3s2

3: APFS Volume Preboot 82.4 MB disk3s3

4: APFS Volume Recovery 536.8 MB disk3s4

5: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk3s5



/dev/disk4 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk4

Physical Store disk2s2

1: APFS Volume CCC Backup - Data 235.8 GB disk4s1

2: APFS Volume CCC Backup 16.4 GB disk4s2

3: APFS Volume Preboot 82.4 MB disk4s3

4: APFS Volume Recovery 540.0 MB disk4s4

5: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk4s5

 

[arw]

Looks all good!

Yes, File Vault is turned on, it's a security feature, how would I know to turn it off?

How could you have known it makes problems, no harm done.
Disable VileFault on your bootable backup (wait until completed - can take some time), clone to internal SSD, then you can re-enable it (on your backup as well as on your MacBook once booted from its internal SSD).
Turn off FileVault encryption on Mac - Apple Support

 

[tomekinc]

Have you read the CCC warning about turning FV off? What does this mean?

Workaround A: Decrypt the backup volume​

We don't want to even suggest this solution given the hassle that most users have had to endure to get their backups re-encrypted after the Catalina upgrade, but this will effectively work around the bug in Disk Utility:

 

[arw]

Have you read the CCC warning about turning FV off? I'm what does this mean?

Workaround A: Decrypt the backup volume​

We don't want to even suggest this solution given the hassle that most users have had to endure to get their backups re-encrypted after the Catalina upgrade, but this will effectively work around the bug in Disk Utility:

All steps you have taken so far were correct and you are on the right track.
What CCC prefers/recommends is to boot your Mac from an unencrypted Catalina install.
Do you have a drive / USB HDD you can temporarily spare and install Catalina onto? You could create a temporary volume but a separate disk would mean the least hassle for you.
Then boot from this fresh Catalina and install CCC and open it.
Then select your external bootable backup as source and your internal SSD as target.
This way (apparently) you can clone your FileVault encrypted backup without disabling FileFault beforehand.

 

[tomekinc]

No, these are way too many steps and I don't have the capability to do that. It's a disaster waiting to happen, I'm sorry but I'm in a real bad place with this. This is really really bad man, I did not expand such a really bad thing to happen. I could never have imagined this. I have no more drives. I was not expecting a bricked laptop. I don't understand why I have to take so many other steps again. Why can't I just install a clean copy of Catalina on this laptop? Is there a problem to do that? Why is turning off filevault and then just using CCC here a problem? This sucks!

 

[arw]

No, these are way too many steps and I don't have the capability to do that. It's a disaster waiting to happen, I'm sorry but I'm in a real bad place with this. This is really really bad man, I did not expand such a really bad thing to happen. I could never have imagined this. I have no more drives. I was not expecting a bricked laptop. I don't understand why I have to take so many other steps again. Why can't I just install a clean copy of Catalina on this laptop? Is there a problem to do that? Why is turning off filevault and then just using CCC here a problem? This sucks!

Now that the SSD is empty, you can install Catalina to the internal SSD.
When setup asks to import data, select your backup disk.
Done

This way you use Migration Assistant to import your Apps & data instead of an 1:1 clone with CCC but the end result for you should be exactly the same.

 

[arw]

You couldn‘t get your SSD formatted by any means and now it‘s erased.
You can finally clean install Catalina (as you desired) and use Migration Assistant to import your backup to use Catalina on your MBP.
Enjoy!

 

[Alpha Centauri]

The Apple Support document you quoted says that (in some circumstances) you can't do a secure erase of an SSD. That is because when preparing a boot disk (to reinstall macOS) you should do a standard erase, install macOS and use FileVault to encrypt after everything is running.

I can confirm secure erase was not an option on an internal 2nd SSD (sata2), even though it wasn't booted from. Diagnosing a potentially bad Cat patched clone, only option was an ext housing and usb2.0. FW was off limits as Cat doesn't support and has led to corrupted disks in the past for me. Once hooked to usb, secure erase was available.

 

[tomekinc]

I can confirm secure erase was not an option on an internal 2nd SSD (sata2), even though it wasn't booted from. Diagnosing a potentially bad Cat patched clone, only option was an ext housing and usb2.0. FW was off limits as Cat doesn't support and has led to corrupted disks in the past for me. Once hooked to usb, secure erase was available.

Can you expand further please on what that means? I need all the information before I head to Genius Bar to get this fixed this morning.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

Can you expand further please on what that means? I need all the information before I head to Genius Bar to get this fixed this morning.

Was just concurring with @gilby101's comment from my experience:

A. patched bootable clone's seem hit and miss.

B. I couldn't enter 'secure erase' option whilst my inernal SSD was SATA connected, DU offered only formating. Different story once mounting over USB.

 

[Jack Neill]

Reading this thread has made my Sunday morning much more enjoyable..

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

PRINT OUT this post and keep it beside you.

Ok, here we go:

1. Power down, ALL THE WAY OFF and DISCONNECT the backup drive.

2. We are going to boot to INTERNET recovery (NOT to "the recovery partition").
Press the power on button and immediately hold down:
Command-SHIFT-OPTION-R

3. You will need your wifi password. The internet utilities take a while to load, be patient as the globe spins.

4. When the utilities have loaded, open disk utilty.

5. VERY VERY IMPORTANT STEP:
Go to the "view" menu and choose "show all devices".

6. Look at the list "on the left". The TOPMOST ITEM represents the physical drive inside. We are going to ERASE IT.

7. Click on the physical drive (top line) and click "erase".
Choose APFS with GUID partition format.

8. The erase shouldn't take long. When done, quit disk utility and open the OS installer.

9. I believe the OS installer will offer you OS 10.15 Catalina.
This is because we used a special version of internet recovery above that installs the original OS that shipped with your MBP (which is Catalina).

10. Start "clicking through". The Mac will reboot one or more times, and the screen will go dark for a minute or more with no indication of activity. Be patient and let the install go through.

11. When the install is done, you should see the initial setup screen "choose your language".

12. CONNECT YOUR BACKUP DRIVE and start "clicking through".

13. At the appropriate moment, setup assistant may ask if you wish to migrate from another drive, YES, you want to do this.

14. "Point" setup assistant to your backup and give it time to digest everything.

15. A POTENTIAL PROBLEM: setup assistant may object that your backup was created with a newer version of the OS (Monterey). I can't predict as to whether this will happen, I'm not there. But... setup assistant might be willing to migrate some of your stuff. Give it a try.

If setup assistant works, it should bring over stuff on your backup.
If setup assistant REFUSES to do the job, there are "other ways" to get the stuff migrated.
It's more work, but it can still be done, and having a CCC cloned backup makes it easier.

If you're still getting nowhere, my advice is to:
Set up a new user account with the new OS.
Then, boot to the "regular" recovery partition (command-R)
Then, go to "Startup Security" and DISABLE ALL SECURITY.
Finally, open terminal and disable SIP by typing:
csrutil disable (space between the two words).

At this point you should be able to boot from the CCC backup, erase the entire drive again, and then "RE-clone" the CCC backup back to the internal drive.

A final thought:
What is it with Monterey that is troubling you?

 

[afterhours]

Gotta say, this has been interesting. I've known Mike Bombich for probably 20+ yrs. Outstanding product, CCC. The current version of CCC is very explicit in stating that it may or may not be able to make a bootable clone drive of OS12 and some earlier versions. Let's hope a permissions issue doesn't crop up, or filevault

OP: not sure if there's clearer instructions than what Fishrrman offered. Please let us all know how it worked out.

 

[tomekinc]

Returning with an update for posterity. I appreciate everyones attempting to assist. Here is what I did to restore the backup.

1. Noting there is merit to the Bombich documentation and error messages, although it's out of date and has holes in it, I decided to continue with that direction as I did not believe that my system, files, hard drive or backup were corrupted in anyway. I felt a lot of the steps and solutions suggested were not taking the Bombich screen shots or notes into consideration. Using my post #23 that showed the Bombich Error screenshots with 'Workaround A' and 'Workaround B', it seemed more logical to attempt these two Workarounds first before anything else.

2. I went to the Apple Genius Bar to attempt 'Workaround B' to boot from another non-encrypted startup disk. They stopped providing these for support 2 years ago and could not help with this at all as they didn't have one for Catalina. He did understand the problem but they could help with that anymore.

3. Went home and decided to attempt 'Workaround A' again and it failed. The Bombich instructions give a warning that starts "we don't even want to suggest this method'... but it doesn't explain why, or what happens, again, just very thin information and no support available. My 2TB Samsung SSD (sold by Apple) backup drive is partitioned in half (my MBP is 1TB), and so I have two backups, and every few weeks or month what was secondary backup gets overwritten as primary. By accident the second time I attempted the reinstall, I clicked on the Secondary backup which I didn't know how old it was and if it was even relevant to back up to. However, it did start to take the drive, and after a few minutes I canceled it (because again, I didn't know what was on it).

4. I decided to try the Primary drive again to restore right after, and... it took! After getting that error message earlier several times. The Primary backup copy had File Vault turned on, the Secondary copy did not. The Laptop had a freshly scrubbed HD (as noted in an earlier step when I deleted it). But, the Primary backup ported over no problem and File Vault was not turned on the Laptop.

Recap: Laptop with newly installed backup didn't have File Vault Turned on but the Primary Backup Had File Vault turned on. I don't understand how, but:

5. I rebooted everything a couple times and it all worked. I then turned File Vault OFF on the backup drive and so it's now turned off everywhere. I haven't attempted a backup yet as I wanted to give it a few days and see how it settled but everything is exactly as it was before I attempted the OS update. The OS is operating completely normal. I also doubt I will turn File Vault on again the future, too much of a headache.

Recap: For some reason, attempting to load a backup without File Vault, cancelling it, then attempting to load the backup with File Vault allowed it to go through. I have no idea how, and I needed a couple days to sit on this before sending over to Bombich. I can say the Bombich software and support instructions for this downgrade were incomplete.

Recap of Bombich failures:

1. They don't have the Downgrade instructions as its own FAQ link, instead it's buried in the Upgrade section but you would never find it if looking (I know, I looked in there, at 40% down I stopped because nothing suggested there was any downgrade info, but you have to scroll all the way down). I looked and searched and finally reached out for help and support:

2. I reached out to Bombich with my laptop setup last Thursday and what I was trying to do, they only sent that link to incomplete instructions. They could have sent more info based on the details I gave them. Nowhere does their info link to the downgraded errors, codes and Workarounds. This should be right in the Downgrade instructions, as either a footnote, prenote, or linked to that other page. That is critical downgrade and install instructions that should be there. But either way, there is NO way for a user to know that error page exists unless you dig for it, and know that there are error bugs for that, so really there is no way for a user like me to have known.

2. Instructions fall apart starting with Step 1 (ONE) !!! I was dead in the water.

3. Missing a lot of steps that come up later, like the types of partitions and other things. The FAQ was last updated in March.

4. I think the FAQ is just out of date and needs a refresh, or maybe the steps are different for Catalina, Big Sur, Monterrey...

4. No support after 5pm, no cursory weekend support, that's on me for not checking before buying. First time in using CCC in a critical situation like this (after a dozen years of use) and they send me incomplete info, but then I was on my own for the entire long weekend. It made me realize that I need to invest in another 3rd party Backup system, preferably that is available on weekends and after hours (so probably another backup drive and figure out an Apple supported backup so I have access to the Genius Bar). Not having a secondary backup, that's totally on me, but then it makes me wonder why I paid $45 for Bombich license just 3 months ago?

All of this would have been prevented with better instructions is my final assessment.

 

[tomekinc]

A final thought:
What is it with Monterey that is troubling you?

It's the visual changes they made to all the windows so they are all bright white with no contrast in the bars, columns or banners. Safari, Preview, etc all bright white, coupled with the trasnlucence thing they are pushing with the menu bar and they jacked up all the icons. I don't have vision problems, and I've never had problems sitting in front of a computer for long periods. So now, why is this so important?

I write proposals for a living, I will stare at these screens for up to 16 hours a day and with Monterrey this White minimalist design, is causing my TBI from 10 years to not accept it. There are certain conditions my brain cannot accept, and the Monterrey design is this quasi-iPhone hybrid of hyper real non colors (white, black) and it's completely unviewable to me. I can't look at those screens for more then 20-30 minutes before I get eye fatigue and it burns white squares into my vision.

I have never in my life had a problem viewing an OS or screen, but Apple has been moving in this dark mode / white text direction and it's causing incredible distress to my brain. I'm not the only one. The brain/eyes need to have these window panes broken apart, there are gray / silver bars and banners everywhere for a reason in every previous OS, it's so your eyes can focus on the context of what you're working on. Now they make your eyes dart all over the screen because I don't know where the actual page stops and banner starts. (Banner being where all the buttons are in Safari or Preview). It's all White on White on White. It's a minimalist Soviet gulag nightmare.

The faint grey icons everywhere, it's so hard to see. The contrast settings make it worse, and they did something with the color calibration, because flipping between the two OS despite color calibrating and changing all the settings, it was a hyper bright white and it's not the same as Catalina. If you compare the Contrast and Accessibilty settings between Catalina and Monterrey, it's way different, I can't use the hyper bright Monterrey Accessibility settings to help, Monterrey Accessibility looks like a Fisher Price toy.

I write in 2 languages and research in up to 4, and I'm constantly flipping and I can easily tell by the Flag in the menu bar what I'm typing in, now they removed it and it's 2 white letters? The whole world uses flags to identify themselves and now Apple decides to use 'letters'. FFS, I cannot see this when sitting back. Constantly leaning in to see.

Cannot Turn Off iPhone WiFi Hotspot, the only way is to disable iPhone Bluetooth. I use the wireless Apple printer, and have to switch to print 10-20 times a day, do you know how many times I already accidentally clicked on the iPhone hotpot? What if I want to use my iPhone headset? A very large cell phone bill disaster is waiting to happen. I can turn WiFi off, but no this iphone - MBP force synching I don't want.

But also the menu bar change, the workaround to turn off Transparency is not the same. I tried 3rd party apps and it's close but still ... the changes to my menu icons, lack of flexibility, forcing a whole lot of stuff that blows my workflow apart.

Oh, how about the bright pink login screen they force you to have, no more custom login wall paper?

Overall I can accept all the tech changes but not extreme. visual ones like this. I feel the laptop is over-engineered with useless features, Monterrey feels like jumping the technical shark. Pushing iPhone features onto my MBP while taking away laptop features for cell phone ones is not what I want. But they jumped the shark by adding another beep/boop to the screen capture shutter sound. Why?

If they allow some visual color changes, or if a 3rd party can provide something better I might stay with Mac, but seeing the direction where it's going, this might be my last one. I've completely rethought the next 5 years, and a Windows machine is almost a certainty now so that I can have more visual flexibility for those long proposal weeks.

 

[Madhatter32]

I downgraded from Big Sur to Catalina on an intel MBP using CCC and never had a single problem. I did it twice -- once using TM and then CCC because the TM restore was much smaller than my original SSD. Interestingly, the TM restore truncated the amount of files. Evidently, TM purges redundant system files so you end up saving a lot of space on an older system like mine. CCC pretty much restores the existing system. I simply wiped the internal SSD and then did the restore.

 

[bombich]

Hi folks. Just going to make a few post-mortem comments here (as the author of CCC):

The Kbase that OP referred to is a large topic, but not one that we felt should be broken down into separate parts. From the perspective of backup software, the "downgrade" procedure starts prior to the upgrade, so they have to be presented together and in the right order to prevent loss of context.

Second, the labor that was involved in this was frustrating and disappointing. I'm disappointed on OP's behalf (livid, in fact) because the problems weren't so much a failure of documentation, rather that he was running into at least two separate Apple bugs. In the first case, selecting a volume, container, or disk in the sidebar and clicking the Erase button – that button should do something! It was literally doing nothing. A button must do something – either erase the item or produce an error indicating why it could not. No result at all is plainly a bug. I recommended using the diskutil command-line utility instead, but my recommendation came late (I'll get to that in a moment).

The other bug was related to trying to restore the backup while booted from an encrypted volume. In order to restore a Catalina volume, we have to transform the destination into a volume group, which we do via the diskutil command-line utility. That works fine for the vast majority of cases, but if you happen to be using a T2 Intel Mac, and you happen to have that Mac booted from an encrypted boot volume (regardless of the relationship between the boot volume and the source/dest to the restore), and that OS happens to be Catalina, then diskutil fails to create a volume group on the internal disk. This was a frustrating scenario. I reported the bug to Apple (FB7477894, almost exactly three years ago), but they never had any intention of fixing it. Their solution was to remove our ability to create volume groups (i.e. in Big Sur), and remove our ability to restore System/Data volumes separately. In retrospect, I'd have encouraged OP to use the "Workaround C" method. That still would not have resolved the Disk Utility Erase bug, but at least the restore part of the procedure would have gone faster and smoother.

Unfortunately, we didn't have that level of context (i.e. from the OP) when he first reached out to us. Not that I would have expected it though – "Hey, so I'm trying to downgrade from Monterey to Catalina, and FYI my MBP is a T2 and my backup is encrypted". OP never would have realized that those attributes of his setup were going to potentially lead to some trouble. Along the same lines, though, it wasn't exactly at the top of my mind either, so it didn't occur to me to ask. Catalina was several years ago, and Apple has thrown so many curveballs from the subsequent OSes that it's really easy to forget about the edge cases. I have updated our "Best practices for upgrading your OS" article to include a caveat about this particular edge case, so hopefully that will avoid any repeats of this particular scenario.

Lastly, regarding support on weekends. We're a six-person company, and offering email-based support on weekdays is the level of support that we can offer (without farming support out to a third-party, which I'll never do). For the record, though, I did actually check in on our Help Desk Saturday morning specifically to see if OP had raised any additional questions or concerns, but we didn't get his reply until later in the day on Saturday. I do appreciate that the Mac community has this forum. Thanks to everyone that chimed in and tried to help.

Mike Bombich
Bombich Software, Inc.

 

[KaliYoni]

Just going to make a few post-mortem comments here (as the author of CCC):

Mike, your response above–and past responses here on MR—are a big part of the reason why I have been a happy CCC customer for many years. I appreciate your personal involvement in interacting with users, even when something bad happens.