Interesting and detailed massage from Mike Bombich at Carbon Copy Cloner regarding macOS Big Sur and Carbon Copy Cloner backups.
Waiting is certainly a good suggestion for the vast majority of people.
That being said, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Big Sur has actually been more reliable than Catalina for me, so I’ve been using it for quite awhile.
It took a little effort to install Big Sur onto my backup drive, but after I did that, I’ve been using CCC to update my backup regularly, and have had no issues.
When a new beta comes out, I boot my MacBook Pro off my backup drive and run the update. Other than that, it’s pretty much normal.
Apple has said they’re aware of the problem, so hopefully it won’t be too long until a fix, although it might not be in 11.0.
Note: Big Sur’s “Release Candidate” has been released, and apparently fixes the problem of not being able to make a bootable backup.
Source: Tweet from Dave Nanian, developer of SuperDuper.
Presumably this means Big Sur will be released soon, I’d guess maybe next week, which isn’t a lot of time for Mike Bombich and Dave Nanian to beta test their apps, which perform a crucial function which has been completely broken for the entire duration of the beta period.
As always: proceed with caution. Don’t upgrade on day 1 if you don’t have a really good reason. Don’t upgrade on week 1 if you don’t have a really good reason. Few people ever regret patience, plenty of people regret updating too soon.