System Restore for Mac

[xxenon]

I've just started to play with macOS Catalina on a 2012 Imac. The OS 'registry' seems to be in plist files, so I'm learning how to edit them, but there doesn't seem to be any option on Time Machine to back up only system files, not all the user files.
If I want to reverse a screwup. I can boot to a second version of Catalina on a bootable usb drive, but it would be much easier if there was a utility that did a 'system restore' only.
Anyone know of one?

 

[NviGate Systems]

Time machine is an incremental backup system. You can manually create a backup point or configure how often it runs. I think the default is 4 hours? So even if you think it's restoring the entire system, it's only going back in time to the point you select. In other words, it's not reloading the whole system, it's merely adjusting files, settings and programs to how they were at the time of backup. Granted if within that time range you wrote or removed many HB of files, that will increase the amount of data that needs to be adjusted. There are drawbacks of course, but that's why it pays to have 2-3 copies of important files.

There is an old download, not sure if it still works or is supported, called "Lion Recovery Disk Creator" that makes a recovery based on the factory or installed recovery partition to a USB drive. That allows you to recover a full system if the built in recovery won't load.

When we did setups on Macs, we would partition a USB Drive (32GB) into two partitions. One small 1-2GB for boot recovery, the rest for use as storage for an initial image once the unit was setup. That way you always had a clean image. But that recovery boot could also restore from Time Machine.

 

[Markverhyden]

There is no equivalent to a Registry in macOS. It's a *nix variant. So it's best to stop using that analogy. .plist list files, as the name implies, contains the user account and/or program properties in context. They are similar in context to .conf files. But rather than plain text they are either XML or binaries. Some, like profiles created using Apple Configurator, are XML and can be read and edited.

Time Machine was not intended to be a swiss army knife for macOS backups. So that's how I use it. If you don't use it that way you can still browse the store to recover data, etc. You can create a restore for each OS version. The catch is they vary based upon what Apple did with the images. So it's not like using Rufus and a M$ OS installer iso. 10.7 forward are relatively easy. Prior to that it wasn't.

 

[Fred Claus]

System restore doesn't exist either. The only way I know to do it is to use the Disk Utility to repair, or use the original install disks to put it back to factory settings.

 

[Markverhyden]

System restore doesn't exist either. The only way I know to do it is to use the Disk Utility to repair, or use the original install disks to put it back to factory settings.

That's not correct. While system restore may not operate exactly the same as M$'s utility that function clearly exists. You can just enter TM from a logged in account and restore what went missing based on date and time. Or you can boot into recovery mode and pick restore from TM back. Personally I'll use the former for just getting data that's gone missing. If there's something serious going on, like a major update hosed the system, I'll use the latter.