Well all, it happened: bootable backup clones with CCC are gone. At least for me with CCC 6.0.4 and Monterey.
I just had a long and not very pleasant email dialogue with Mike Bombich about my recent attempt to clone my Monterey install. It failed, and Mike pointed out that this will happen much more in the future as many of us knew - because this is what Apple wants.
Now I did use the legacy boot option, but it failed. Mike pointed out why, but clearly reminded me that soon there won't be a legacy boot option anyway, because that is what Apple wants.
His recommendation was try plan B: Plan B for a simple bootable backup is kind of a nightmare, which, if you read below, he fullly admits. First, you install your OS on your projected clone. (In my case, that took a LONG time on a very fast NVME drive). Then your best bet is to use migration assistant to migrate all your settings to your bootable backup clone. Again, that takes a dreadful amount of time.
Now I have done this and I'm looking at about three hours. And remember, every time Apple upgrades its code, you will have to upgrade this way. Imagine that....
How do you quickly recover from a failure? Well, he actually has no answer for that.....
More from our dialogue:
MIKE: "No, I'm actually suggesting that you stop doing that."
MIKE: "I agree! Please, stop doing it this way! Don't make bootable backups, make Standard Backups instead (i.e. the "default settings"). This is precisely the experience that I'm trying to have people avoid, this is why I'm trying to convince people to stop trying to make the backup bootable. What do you have when this is complete? Is the bootable backup substantively better than a Standard (non-bootable) backup? No, it's marginally better at best, and given the hassle that you have to go through to make and keep it bootable, I think it's now worse."
The problem that Mike deftly avoids is the situation wherein you need to complete a project and you can't because of disk failure. If you could boot your backup, you could do what's needed to complete it.
But sure, if you have multiple Macs sitting around doing nothing and you have the backup of the project you could just move the project over to your excess machine (Well, sure I have a couple of Mac Pros just sitting around waiting for me to use them). You do too, right?
You know this sounds like a ploy by Apple to make sure they can sell more hardware. Because if you've got a critical project, you have to have two Mac Pros (or two of any Mac hardware). And they have to be mirrored and exactly the same. Then and only then can you trust that if you move a project from a failed Mac to another Mac, you can count on being able to continue uninterrupted.