Comment by xoa
1 day ago
Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.
Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.
@xoa may I ask what do you use as iSCSI initiator?
Sorry for missing this! I use Xtend SAN by ATTO [0], which has been around a long time but is still getting basic updates including native Apple Silicon support now, and seems to perform well. It uses a kext and I do worry the day may come that Apple kills support despite having nothing ready to go for equivalent functionality, but so far so good.
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0: https://www.atto.com/products/xtend-san-iscsi-initiator/