hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate

In the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta, the command-line tool hdiutil is being deprecated and users are advised to switch to diskutil image for all disk image operations. The new diskutil image provides subcommands for attach, create, resize, info, and chpass, which are supported by ASIF (Apple Sparse Image Format) images. However, hdiutil options, such as -puppetstrings for progress output and -srcfolder for creating disk images from a folder, have been missing in diskutil.

A comparison between hdiutil and diskutil using a daily backup of the user home folder on a MacBook Pro revealed that diskutil was significantly faster, taking around 40 to 45 seconds on average, and resulted in a smaller dmg file size of 2.8 GB, compared to 2.89 GB from hdiutil. Moreover, diskutil behaved as if the -scrub option of hdiutil were enabled, omitting temporary files during the disk image creation process.

Despite these improvements, diskutil still suffers from the bug of inaccessible .bnnsir files on macOS Sequoia, a problem that has remained unresolved since a previous report was filed with Apple.