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The new Recovery position

HIDDEN BEHIND FRIENDLY windows and menus is a different Mac, full of NVRAM, Recovery Modes, and keyboard gymnastics. Knowing how to run Safe Mode or Diagnostics isn’t straightforward on Intel Macs. When using an M1 Mac, this is transformed: Recovery and its tools are engaged simply by pressing and holding the Power button until they start loading. You then have consistent access to most old modes, and useful tools like Disk Utility and macOS Installer, which are available no matter why you entered Recovery in the first place.

Also gone are the old internet versions which loaded so infuriatingly slowly. That’s because M1 Recovery runs from a completely separate protected part of the internal SSD, alongside its firmware. These better tools are an important part of the Mac’s brighter future.

> Bootable backups out of favor

How can I make a bootable backup of my M1 iMac’s internal storage?

Although you can do this reliably using the latest version 6 of Carbon Copy Cloner, it’s no longer such a useful procedure for M1 Macs, as you can’t clone that backup back to an M1 Mac’s internal SSD. That’s because these new Macs rely on quite a different process for restoring to your startup disk, which begins with installing a fresh copy of the macOS System volume and completes by migrating data from your backup.

This ensures that Big Sur’s sealed System volume is secure and completely intact, which can only be guaranteed by Apple’s macOS installer app. Instead of starting up from the external disk containing the backup, installing and restoring are more easily performed in the M1’s much–improved Recovery Mode.

By default, utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! now only copy and back up your files from the Data volume, which also saves you from wasting storage space with the System volume. If you really want to copy that as well, Carbon Copy Cloner offers a legacy mode which does that, but you won’t find it particularly useful on an M1 Mac because of its many limitations. To do this, select the destination disk and use the command from the contextual menu.