How to Back up Catalina

[nephdoc]

The question actively being discussed on at least two Mac email forums is whether it's imperative that SuperDuper! clones on rotating platter hard drives MUST be to APFS-formatted drives, because APFS rotating platter drives are GLACIALLY slow as boot drives.

I'm not sure whether there's a Disk Utility default in Catalina when making a new external drive bootable that it be formatted APFS, or whether one can manually select HFS extended, and also whether an external drive formatted HFS extended can boot a T2-security chip equipped MacBook Pro can be used as a SuperDuper! clone.

Thanks so much,
Jim Robertson