Super curious about your yearly clean installs. Could you do a short breakdown of your process and the tools you use to manage it?

Also, what do you use for backups?

Thank you.

Why do you do clean installs? I've been moving the same MacOS image since 2006. Four machines, without any issues using whatever MacOS provides at the time.

Do you have a good way of discovering these keys / syncing them with the UI? I like to do the same thing but sometimes change a setting in the UI and don’t know what to update in my script without diffing the entire prefs directory before and after the change.

AFAIK diffing is the only way, I'd love to hear if anyone has a better technique

Dotfiles are wizard AF. Been using them on my departmental deployments for a while now and will never go back.

are you mathiasbynens? If so, thank you. I've been using that script as a reference for my own clean install script. Not sure where else I could have found the information, seems like Apple themselves are against documenting it and have in fact deprecated some of the settings in later macOS versions.

This is gold. Thanks!