Boot from sandbox or just use it as a backup.

[fred]

OK, I've got another question that I can't find an answer to in the manual.

I've decided for the time being to not use a sandbox but to just make a full bootable clone and smart update that. The reason being I want a back up as well as being safe, and this suits me fine at the moment because if I'm nervous about a system update then I can just boot from my clone and if it gets destroyed, recreate it from the HD and wait till the fixed update is available.

However my question is this...

Say I do something on my HD that is catastrophic like for example I go to Terminal and mean to type in

Sudo rm -rf 'System Folder'

But I accidentally leave off the final quote mark and thus trash my System.

(I actually did this) anyway what I ended up doing was an achive and reinstall which worked OK and I didn't lose anything. But it took quite a few days to get all everything back in order.

Now If I had done that now, when I have a bootable complete clone, could I somehow just copy my clone back to the hard drive by using a command like erase HD and copy the clone to the HD?. Or is this not possible because as it says in the documentation "there are some System files that Apple recommends not copying" when making a bootable system copy.

Or would another way to go about it be to do a clean install and update the system to the latest version and then to drag my home folder from the cloned back up into the new 'Users' folder.