Rolling back Ventura options?

[ylluminate]

Before digging into the Ventura upgrade, I'd like to cover my bases since the reinstallation landscape has been changing over the last few years. What are the current best practices to be able to roll back to Monterey (macOS 12) if something goes wrong with Ventura (macOS 13)?

I have an 8tb internal drive that is nearly full so the normal "restore from Time Machine" is a laughable option since the transfer alone from Time Machine would take a couple days for me based on previous experience and testing...

So I'm hoping we have some better snapshot options for recovery vs full data transfers that also generate wear on the internal drive that we really don't want to push that hard if unnecessary.

 

[ylluminate]

Anyone?

 

[Farsider]

You can't roll back using the macOS installer.

SuperDuper / Carbon Copy Clone your Monterey install then upgrade to Venture. If you want to revert to Monterey, roll back to using your clone. This will roll back your entire drive back to the way it was at the time you took the clone. You'll want to make a backup of all your data before doing that though as that'll be rolled back too.

FWIW, I keep my data on a separate disk for the reasons above so my boot drive can be effectively disposible.

 

[ylluminate]

Thanks @Farsider. I used to do this, but with the move to a massive new internal drive I figured I might as well forget about trying to maintain separate volumes, especially since I've had trouble with ever evolving expectations for root volume size demands with apps and libraries. I don't even have any idea any longer what a "safe" root (boot) volume size is any longer thanks to this.