[MacTUG] Suggestions for quickly restoring a test mac to a 'snapshot'

[Glenn Anderson]

Hi Don,

What about doing something simple like making a full backup of the “original” state and then when you want to restore simply restore from that backup disk?

Such an approach is fairly quick if both drives ( in the computer ) and the backup one are SSD drives and you are using USB 3, thunderbolt etc.

Alternatively instead of installing the software on your ‘original’ drive in the Mac, you could boot the Mac off the backup SSD drive and install on it and such. This approach would mean you would only need to do one backup ( original/computer to backup drive ), rather than ( original/computer to backup, and then later backup to original to restore the original/computer )

As to backup, Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper would likely be best.

- Glenn



On Oct 16, 2018, at 2:30 PM, Donald Duff-McCracken <dsmccrac at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:dsmccrac at uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:

When I am building packages, there are times when I would like to reset my mac its ‘original’ state it was in before any software was installed. Currently I just reformat it and reinstall the OS which is time consuming.

I am considering using a mac VM with Parallels Destkop, but I would prefer a non-vm to have the test mac be more like the eventual clients. I know that some folks on campus have used “deep freeze” https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze/mac but wonder if there are other alternatives.

Any suggestions?
Don

PS: Can you “reply all” if you have any suggestions as Mike is interested, too.

------------------------------------
Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-computing/about/people
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