Symptoms

macOS Catalina operating system fails to boot after bare-metal restore if it is restored with a bootable media created in macOS Catalina 10.15.5 version.

Cause

There is a bug in 10.15.5 that prevents third-party apps from creating firmlinks in APFS filesystem.

Firmlinks are APFS filesystem objects created on the system volume at installation time. Firmlinks facilitate unified content representation of volumes (the read-only System volume and the Data volume) within one Volume Group in the APFS container and allow forward and back traversal between parts of the two volumes. Firmlinks can only be created by the system during installation and cannot be created by users or third-party applications, which is causing the boot failure.

Solution

This issue has been fixed in Acronis Cyber Protect 15: bootable media created in macOS Catalina 10.15.5 performs recovery correctly.

For earlier versions of Acronis products: this issue does not affect backup functionality; you can still create consistent backups on macOS 10.15.5. However, you need to restore a backup of macOS Catalina (any version) using a bootable media built on macOS 10.15 to 10.15.4 (these versions don't have the bug) or 10.15.6 or later (where this bug is fixed). If you don't have a bootable media created on macOS 10.15.4 or 10.15.6 or later, please contact Acronis Support.