[an0therdumbsn]

A feature that i had in windows xp that i really liked and was dissapoint to see missing from OSX was the restore point feature where if you mess somethin up you can go back to an earlier "restore point" and serves as an easy fix to a problem.
Although with OSX a feature like this may not really be needed and may very well be hidden around somewhere and i just dont know about it.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by an0therdumbsn:
A feature that i had in windows xp that i really liked and was dissapoint to see missing from OSX was the restore point feature where if you mess somethin up you can go back to an earlier "restore point" and serves as an easy fix to a problem.
Although with OSX a feature like this may not really be needed and may very well be hidden around somewhere and i just dont know about it.

You could use Carbon Copy Cloner and just backup your drive to another. It's not the same thing as the restore point feature, but it's more reliable IMO. Similarly, Ghosting a Windows XP drive is preferred as a system backup.

[Wiskedjak]

The faithful will argue that the MacOS never fails and therefore doesn't require something like system restore. However, there's always user error or faulty OS upgrades that would be nice to undo. For example, the latest MacOS update appears to have done something to the dvd player and possibly the battery. I'd like the option to got back to 10.3.4

[ManOfSteal]

As nice as a "feature" that may be on Windows, I can't count how many times the "feature" hasn't worked when critically needed...

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally posted by manofsteal:
As nice as a "feature" that may be on Windows, I can't count how many times the "feature" hasn't worked when critically needed...

Also uses a nice chunk of the hard drive you won't be seeing for awhile. Feature or pain-in-the-ass? Sometimes it's one but most other times it's the other. I'll let you guess the proportions and you can decide for yourself which is more important.

[Appleman]

What about Journaling?
What about Disk Utility?

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by manofsteal:
As nice as a "feature" that may be on Windows, I can't count how many times the "feature" hasn't worked when critically needed...

I can't count them either. Recovery console is also not very reliable. Who can really use it but the more advanced user? As an earlier poster said, Ghosting is a more preferred method for OS recovery with Windows.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by manofsteal:
As nice as a "feature" that may be on Windows, I can't count how many times the "feature" hasn't worked when critically needed...

I found the restore point to be an invalueable tool. I've used it in critical situations and it saved my bacon. It has worked everytime and I've never seen it not work. I also know it saved a friend's computer due to a botched anti-virus install.

Overall I think this is a great utility but I'm one of those people who believe the infrastructure of OSX diminishes the need for this type of utility. The only time I think it might be handy is when applying the 10.x.x patches. I see posts here and other places asking how to downgrade.

Mike

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Appleman:
What about Journaling?
What about Disk Utility?

They aren't really related to the feature in question?

[mitchell_pgh]

I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned this before, but there was such a feature planned for 10.3, but it just didn't make it... there were major issues with it...

It's sloppy IMHO and spotty from everyone that I have talked to about it.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Maflynn:
I found the restore point to be an invalueable tool. I've used it in critical situations and it saved my bacon. It has worked everytime and I've never seen it not work. I also know it saved a friend's computer due to a botched anti-virus install.

Overall I think this is a great utility but I'm one of those people who believe the infrastructure of OSX diminishes the need for this type of utility. The only time I think it might be handy is when applying the 10.x.x patches. I see posts here and other places asking how to downgrade.

Mike

Never worked properly for me in Windows. Good idea, but a problematic implementation. Ghosting is much better.

Actually, I don't do that either anymore. I just back up my data religiously. If my XP box gets fubar'd I don't care. It will give me an excuse to start over and get rid of all the crap I don't need anymore. And that might just include the XP box itself.

[tooki]

Radmind can be used to achieve this.

www.radmind.org i think

tooki

[lenox]

I dunno about you guys, but when I heard about restore points in windows, I laughed and took it to mean, "look, we know our OS is screwed-up. We know it can ruin itself beyond repair. Look! We even made a tool to 'fix' it!"

I consider it a band-aid where only amputation will do.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
It will give me an excuse to start over and get rid of all the crap I don't need anymore. And that might just include the XP box itself.

While it has worked for me when I used it, I've still needed to reinstall XP many times. I agree with other posters in that its a sad commentary on Microsoft's OS stability, that a software installation or user action coule leave the OS hosed.


Mike

[TimmyDee51]

In addition to being spotty, the restore point can also be very harmful when it comes to viruses. At work, we had to disable system restore so that the virus' registry entry's wouldn't be saved. In the long run, I think it ends up being more of a pain than it's worth. Besides, in all my experiences with OS X (labs, faculty and staff computers, my own), I have never hosed it bad enough where I said, "I wish I could turn back the clock". There's ususally an easier, more reliable, and more robust solution.

[Anubis IV]

Originally posted by Appleman:
What about Journaling?
What about Disk Utility?

Journaling was actually the first thing that came to mind with me as well. It's not quite the same as a restore point, but it does provide an extra security blanket against some things that might have otherwise hosed your system.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by TimmyDee51:
In addition to being spotty, the restore point can also be very harmful when it comes to viruses. At work, we had to disable system restore so that the virus' registry entry's wouldn't be saved. In the long run, I think it ends up being more of a pain than it's worth. Besides, in all my experiences with OS X (labs, faculty and staff computers, my own), I have never hosed it bad enough where I said, "I wish I could turn back the clock". There's ususally an easier, more reliable, and more robust solution.

System Restore worked for me once, at home. I had to use it because IE would not launch under some user accounts and it kept causing a BSOD. I rolled it back one month, and all was well [as good as XP gets] again. eMachines did not offer a refresh OS, but only a wipe the drive clean and reinstall the OS.

[jasong]

System Restore usually works for me. The annoying part is when it fails and it doesn't tell you why, and any restore point from before the one that failed is useless.

Honestly, I have never had a need for this feature in OS X (or any Mac OS), the whole reason this feature is needed in Windows is because of the Registry, which once altered is otherwise impossible to return to it's previous state. Without that, trashing an offending app ends its affects on your system.

-- Jason

[MDA]

Where I work it's one of the first things the Windows support guys disable because it slows the PC's down over time and eats up hard drive space.

MDA

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Anubis IV:
Journaling was actually the first thing that came to mind with me as well. It's not quite the same as a restore point, but it does provide an extra security blanket against some things that might have otherwise hosed your system.

Journaling ensures file system integrity. To my knowledge, restore points are about the state of the OS files, not low-level file system abnormalities. That's like somebody hearing somebody complain about a virus and going, "Well, try Disk Doctor." It solves a completely different problem than they were complaining about.

[ReggieX]

Thank goodness nothing outside of Windows has a Registry!

[Drakino]

Originally posted by Anubis IV:
Journaling was actually the first thing that came to mind with me as well. It's not quite the same as a restore point, but it does provide an extra security blanket against some things that might have otherwise hosed your system.

Windows XP has journaling when it uses NTFS. As does Windows 2000 and 2003.

[fiesta cat]

In the past two and a half years, I've not encountered a problem that couldn't be fixed by simple means (such as dragging the offending application and/or it's prefs, over to the trash).

We could all spend many hours pointing out that if Windows had been designed better, it would need a restore point function about as much as a Mac does.

But let us look at a real restore point feature - cloning your HDD to another HDD. A HDD that is physically seperate from the machine. A restore point feature does you no good if it exists on the same drive that your machine runs off of and it physically fails, or if something goes terribly wrong.

With an external (which can be done cheap these days), you could literally be back up and running in a few minutes, and from that environment you may even be able to recover any data off of the original boot drive, or even fix whatever is the problem.

Maybe it's because I'm old fashioned, I just think if it's worth having any kind of back-up at all, it's worth doing right, and keeping it seperate from the same HDD as the machine runs off of (or better yet, seperate from the machine).