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lukele/Boot SuperDuper backup in VMWare.md

Last active March 18, 2022 16:42
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Boot SuperDuper! backup in VMWare
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Boot SuperDuper backup in VMWare.md

Boot SuperDuper! backup in VMWare Fusion

It's quite strange that VMWare doesn't expose this feature in the UI directly, but fortunately enough it's pretty easy to do.

  1. Create a new custom virtual machine with macOS 10.14 as guest
  2. Quit VMWare after creating the virtual machine
  3. Change into the virtual machine folder ~/Virtual Machines/<name>.vmwarevm
  4. Connect your external harddrive with your SuperDuper! bootable backup
  5. Use diskutil list to figure out which device number your harddrive was assigned
  6. Create a raw disk using the vmware-rawDiskCreator tool which is linked to the external harddrive:

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk<deviceNr> fullDevice ./external-link lsilogic

  1. Edit your <name>.vmx file and replace the line starting with sata0:0.fileName with sata0:0.fileName = "external-link.vmdk"
  2. Save the file
  3. Open VMWare and start your virtual machine.

TADA!! You can now boot your backup

@ingvaldlorentzen
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Have you gotten this to work in macOS 10.15 Catalina?

I can't seem to get it to work

@lukele
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lukele commented Apr 2, 2021

Just tried it again and still works like a charm with Big Sur. It's important to use device with the Apple_APFS Container and EFI partition. Not the one with the single partitions.

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