> GoBack was designed by Wild File, Inc., a company located in Plymouth, Minnesota. The software was shown at COMDEX in November 1998 and released in December 1998.
> GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research.
^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack
As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.
You're right, the article said "replaced by" and I assumed it had some lineage, but no.
Time Machine is file-based, whereas GoBack was block-based. GoBack could revert absolutely anything - even changes a program made to the OS or even to the boot sector! If you did something that made the machine not bootable, it was still a matter of seconds to boot into the GoBack supervisor and ask it to revert to a previous state.
APFS is quite powerful but its functionality hasn't been really exposed very well to the user.
Since Catalina the OS itself is in a read-only volume and everything else is separate - by default, respectively "Macintosh HD" and "Data" as exposed in Disk Utility. Strictly speaking, I think programs cannot change the OS or boot sector. The only thing I know of that can is a macOS upgrade itself, and it does automatically take a pre-upgrade snapshot for the ability to restore.
Sure, but suppose I run something that spews all over, say, my homebrew install. That's not "part of the OS", but it might as well be.
Can apfs snapshots roll that back? Probably? But that functionality isn't exposed to mere mortals (and certainly not on the startup volume).
If there's a way to do this:
1. make-some-kind-of-snapshot abc123
2. make some changes all over the place (I don't know where!) that i then want to revert
3. restore-to abc123
and at this point, the entire system is exactly, precisely, bit for bit how it was after step 1 -- and where step 3 takes just a few seconds -- well, I'd love to know about it.
Time Machine can do that. Whether they're automatic or manual backups, you can boot your system in recovery mode and restore from a backup to fully revert to a previous snapshot. It will require a reboot and the speed of execution will depend on the size of the changeset from the current state.
> GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research.
^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack
As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.