In mac OS 27.0, hdiutil is deprecated. Use diskutil image instead for all disk image operations. ASIF images are only supported by diskutil image. Most hdiutil options appear preserved under different names, but some are missing, such as -puppetstrings for parseable progress output.

Testing a daily home folder backup on a MacBook Pro revealed clear differences. hdiutil took around 110 to 115 seconds and triggers an authentication prompt because one file is owned by root. diskutil image simply fails without triggering that prompt, requiring the removal of the root-owned file to succeed.

diskutil image completed significantly faster at 40 to 45 seconds. The resulting dmg file was also smaller, 2.8 GB versus hdiutil’s 2.89 GB. Comparisons showed diskutil excluded the ~/.Trash/ folder, behaving as if the -scrub option were enabled. Progress percentages update in-place, providing a substitute for the missing parsing features.