Is it possible to restore a macbook pro to an earlier date without an external hard drive backup?
Time Machine doesn't require an external drive but it does require a dedicated partition. Without more info about your system its hard to be more specific. If you have an internal drive with little or nothing on it you can partition that drive and use one of the partitions for Time Machine, given its big enough. Setting partitions will erase the drive.
Why are you avoiding an external drive? I use an external drive for my time machine and it works fine. If its due to the time involved there are workarounds for that.
Mac OS does have the ability to do this. However, some specific criteria are required before it can be used.
- The drive must be formatted as APFS. (This is the default if you have a recent version of Mac OS installed on a Mac which has an SSD.)
- Time Machine must be enabled.
Once those two things are true, then Mac OS will periodically create “snapshots” which are (as far as I can tell) very similar to Windows’ “restore point”.
They can be used to restore a Mac to a previous state. I know because I did this myself a few weeks ago when I woke up and my Mac wouldn’t boot.
These “snapshots” are stored on the local SSD, and can be seen by using the tmutil command in Terminal.app:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
You can even tell Mac OS to create a snapshot by issuing this command, again in Terminal.app:
tmutil localsnapshot
How many snapshots you can have on your Mac depends on the amount of diskspace used and how much has changed on your drive.
This is a fairly new feature, and I would not want to rely on it, but it can be a life-saver in the right situation.
Still, your best bets remain:
A complete, bootable backup via SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner
Time Machine
A remote backup. (I use Backblaze.)
In addition, I store all my important and currently-in-use files on Dropbox. Dropbox isn’t a backup solution, but it does keep revisions of your files for the past 30 days (or 120 on the pro accounts) and updates every time you hit “save” (assuming you have a network connection), so it may be the best bet to recover that file you were working on when your computer died suddenly.