Create dmg Image of High Sierra via Disk Utility

[Freistellheld]

Hi everyone,

Up until macOS Sierra I backed up my boot Drive via Disk Utility from the USB install stick and created a dmg file to an external storage. How can I do this with High Sierra and its apfs file system?

I tried to do so by checking the list view option at the top left corner of Disk Utility and deactivated the high Sierra volume (lowest one in tree size view). Then I highlighted the „Main“ ssd/Root device and created a dmg. This ends up as a 15gb image. Somewhere else I read that you have to create an image of the apfs container (one level below the „root device“). I did that and endend up with an image of 250gb (thats the size of my entire ssd). Which one of these images is the right one? I assume the bigger one but I dont get why they are that much different in size considering the „Root“ device should contain the lower containerpartition anyway.

Yes I know that there is carbon copy cloner and super duper to do the job but would like to use onboard methods as the way using Disk Utility was always reliable.

Thanks in advance and have a nice day!

 

[dragonlover00]

I have noticed when preforming full disk backups using Disk utility on (10.12 w/ HFS) I can get a good image of the boot drive nicely compressed with all partition schemes/drive IDs, etc in tact as long as the disk you want to image isn't mounted and you select the option for a compressed DMG, I never do the full container, just backup your EFI partition into a ZIP file, save it with your boot disk DMG, and recreate the EFI+disk0s2 layout with a Multibeast and just install the plain version of Clover while EFI is mounted. Then you can take your drive you want to restore too and use Disk Utility to restore the disk0s2 boot volume and cp -F your entire EFI's zipped contents over to the "plain Clover" EFI partition you made earlier. If it's a R/W image or (not sure) sparse disk image it will copy everything from the first to last bytes on your drive, thus the full disk size's file size. As I said, I haven't messed with APFS. Have you considered booting your 10.13 system with a 10.12 installer to avoid any APFS bs entirely to take your image in a traditional zipped DMG, then "cp" your EFI folder from terminal or zip it after mounting the drive?