Is is possible to add tag, notes or labels to backups made by Time Machine?
Is it possible to add label, tag or notes to Time Machine backups. Lets say after fresh reinstall of OS X - label it as "Base System 1" then after few days (at some point with more software/work) "Designer Workstation - Base System 2" etc.
So, in case if system needs to be restored to a known good state (because of crash or otherwise). It would be easy to look at tag/notes and decide which one to restore. Than to just look at date-time stamps.
I know full bootable clones are the way to go. In addition to one bootable clone, it will be great to have multiple tagged restore points in Time Machine.
Is there a way to achieve this?
No, it's not possible to tag any specific revision in TimeMachine.
In brief - tag a file on your filesystem and let Time Machine store the tagged file. You could also decide to keep a text file anywhere on the backup and adding tags / labels / narrative to that file. Someone could program a UI for this and present the history of Time Machine backups quite easily since everything is stored in a native filesystem storage view. I haven't seen any program that does tagging, but you might look at BackupLoupe for browsing your backups.
If you had a general purpose tagging system using spotlight - that also would work for searching since spotlight also indexes Time Machine backups:
- Tag any file in OS X using spotlight and a marker character
- Tag files using finder and metadata fields
- Many third party apps exist to add tagging to the filesystem - search the app store for "file tagging" if the previous links are not helpful for you.
In practice, I can usually figure out which backup I need by looking at the contents of a backup and checking the modified date of a specific App or system file to correspond with a specific update or install. I do see how for some, having a place to write detailed notes to evernote or a text file or elsewhere would be useful in parsing a Time Machine store - especially if your store isn't full or long enough where Time Machine starts deleting older backups to reclaim space for newer versions of files.