How to take a snapshot of the entire Macbook Pro OS x 10.8 Mountain Lion system

Question

I want to be able to take a snapshot of the current system and return to it whenever I corrupt the files. I looked at the Time Machine solution, but realized that this is only a good solution when I know which file I am looking for. But sometimes, some installation processes create binaries along several system paths that are very difficult to find and identify. Say I installed the package, but then I felt that I should not have done this. Deletion may still leave files. So, what may be some of the elegant solutions to return to the status of a machine when everything is fine and clean.

Answer 1

Use Disk Utility (Applications | Utilities) Click on the HDD, and then click on the new image. You can choose a compressed image or not. If there is not much disk space, it should not exceed 30-40 GB. When you have the dmg file, place it somewhere for backup purposes. In addition, create a recovery disc using the recovery tool.

Answer 2

I do not know about the "elegant", but the "Carbon Clown Copier" is, of course, a simple solution to return to the previous state. You can make an exact clone of your disk, and then restore it if something goes horribly wrong. I use CCC to create periodic backups of my Macs, as a kind of secondary backup for a time machine, which is easy to use, but I don’t have full confidence.

Answer 3

You can restore the entire system from a Time Machine snapshot, but it requires booting from the recovery partition or recovery disk. Basically, after rebooting in recovery mode, you can select Restore From Time Machine Backup , and then you will be asked to find the drive. After you do this, a list of Time Machine snapshots for recovery will be presented.

I have not done this recently, but there are indications that backup time can always be in PST, so be careful when looking at the time.

Answer 4

While OSX ships with TimeMachine, it also has the famous (Linux community!) Rsync command-line tool.

With Google, I'm sure you can find a lot of articles on how to use it, although here's an interesting blog about why its author uses rsync with a time machine.