Manually setting backup points - alternatives to Time Machine Time Machine automatically takes backups every hour of the last day, every day of the last month, etcetera.

I just finished setting up a new Mavericks installation, and turned it on.

It took one snapshot. 22 gigs. But then one hour later it took another one. Another 22 gigs.



What a waste of space! I didn't even touch my computer in between these two backups(even though my MacBook does seem to have doodled half a gig into existence).

This is horrible! All it is doing is copying my entire filesystem into a folder on my harddrive.  I can do that myself!  And then I can do it at sensible junctures.

For example, let's say I'm going to evaluate a dozen text editors, some of which I need to compile from the command line, involving homebrew, Mac Ports, filling my file system with nonsense that very possibly isn't going to get removed cleanly.

So I would first backup, try all the competitors out, then revert and install the winner, and take another backup.

As far as I can see, I can just create a folder on my external hard drive and drag drop my filesystem into it.  Then I should be able to, from within disk utility, "restore from Time Machine backup" and just select the folder.

This has the added bonus that I can create sensible folder names for my various backups.

Can anyone confirm, can I do this? Is there a better way?

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
Because of the way TimeMachine has saved the data, you don't actually have two copies.  It just seems that each backup is a full set of files (which it is; but, in the background there is some nifty unix filesystem "trickery" going on).

If you go to the enclosing folder (π's MacBook Air) or the top-level of the hard drive itself, you should see around 22GB used there, and not 44GB.

(Edit)
As for dragging/dropping, unless you do it as the root user, some files will not be copied into your destination folder, due to permission issues.  And, copying large amounts of data via Finder can strain your CPU and your patience.

Rsync is a better alternative than drag/drop.  And, if your goal is to set a bookmark for your file system to revert to after experimenting with text editors and what-not, it might actually be better than Time Machine.  Time Machine is good for recovering accidentally deleted files; but, if you want to return the computer to a previous state, you would have to "restore" the complete old Applications/ folder, just to "remove" the new files added there that you don't want anymore.  Rsync would make that a little more amenable.