New to iMacs - restore 2008 model

[Whitey012001]

Hi, I'm new to iMacs and just brought a secondhand 2008 iMac from work. It didn't come with any restore disks. The IT team had upgraded it to mavericks but they said they don't have restore disks???

Could somebody tell me how I would restore if I needed to?

Also, could somebody tell me if the Mac OS has something similar to windows restore points?

Thanks in advance

Neil

 

[Ak907Freerider]

At restart hold down command and R. This will bring up where you can restore or erase the computer.

 

[Whitey012001]

ok many thanks.

 

[Brian33]

The "command + R" technique at boot time may not help if your internal boot drive has failed, will it? I thought newer iMacs had an internet restore feature to deal with that, but that it's built into the EFI and so won't work on older iMacs. Something to check into.

In any case, when I upgraded my Early 2008 24" iMac to Mountain Lion, it didn't create the restore partition anyway. My solution was to make a bootable USB installer. Now I can easily boot Mountain Lion from that to use Terminal or Disk Utility or re-install if I need to.

Google "bootable USB Mavericks Installer" for more info.

As far as restore points -- I would use Time Machine backups for this. You can certainly recover files from any of the stored points in time, and I believe you can restore the entire system to match any of the stored backups, too. TM automatically does backups every hour, but you can also start one manually, for example if you're just about to do a major system change.

 

[Whitey012001]

Thanks brian33. I've done something similar with my PC when my disk was scratches.

I've set up a usb hard drive as a time machine backup, my mother-in-law lost her hard drive last month and lost a several years worth of pictures.