[Joshfromtexas]

I just bought a 2020 MacBook Pro 13 Intel i5 with MacOS Big Sur. I also found the storage is soldered to the system board. I believe it is a PCIe/NVMe type, not SATA anymore. The partition is APFS, not Mac OS Extended. I want to clone it to an external storage, and be able to restore from it in case of corruption.

So what type of the external storage should I get for this clone in 2021. I believe most writing on this are for old SATA times prior to 2014. They just assumed everything were SATA. Not anymore! It's 2021 now, SATA is out and NVMe is the king.

So what type of the external drive shoudl it be:
1) Any old 2.5" SATA spinning hard disk drive
2) Any 2.5" SATA SSD 7mm
3) Any M.2 2280 SATA SSD stick
4) Any M.2 2280 PCIe 2.0 x2 NVMe stick with B+M key
5) Any M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe stick with B+M key
6) Any M.2 2280 PCTe 3.0 x4 NVMe stick with M key

Please advise!
Thanks

[Ed7789]

The type of drive is not important. As long as the drive’s capacity is higher or equal to your internal drive’s, and that you can connect it to your computer using a compatible enclosure, it should work fine.

What is more important is the software you will use to clone your drive. You need to make sure it is compatible with your operating system.

[Joshfromtexas]

Thanks for your reply. So my old 2.5" Spinning 1TB SATA HDD would work for external boot and restore as well?
Would Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! work for MacOS 11.2.3 (Big Sur)?

Thanks

[Ed7789]

Thanks for your reply. So my old 2.5" Spinning 1TB SATA HDD would work for external boot and restore as well?
Would Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! work for MacOS 11.2.3 (Big Sur)?

Thanks

Yes for the drive.

Regarding the tools, there are a lot of caveats with macOS Big Sur. I suggest you read about those first.
Carbon Copy Cloner: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/macos-big-sur-known-issues
SuperDuper!: https://shirt-pocket.com/blog/ . My quick read is that Big Sur support is only on beta versions of the tool.

I have no experience with drive cloning tools for macOS, so I’m not going to be help you a lot with those.