Ghost was descended from my absolute favorite late-90s / early 00s tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack which, as you say, let you undo absolutely anything you did to your machine.
I wish I had something like it on Mac.
I wish I had something like it on Mac.
> 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.
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.
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.