When I had a Mac I used Carbon Copy Cloner to image the disks solving that entire problem. It creates bootable backups then which you can restore to exactly the

When I had a Mac I used Carbon Copy Cloner to image the disks solving that entire problem. It creates bootable backups then which you can restore to exactly the original state. Time machine was a veritable pain in my arse on numerous occasions including one that nearly shafted everything I had. I genuinely don't trust it or HFS+ and never would ever again. TBH I've moved to Windows as a primary platform now and I'm just using Beyond Compare to sync my data by hand to bitlocker encrypted USB sticks (3x 128Gb Corsair Survivor) and keep one on my keyring, one in the car and one at home. Takes about 2 hours to build a windows machine from scratch now including OS, Office, dev tools, updates onto an SSD. I imagine that would work reasonably well on a Mac too if you skipped half the junk that appeared in the user's profile.