How to Create a Baseline Backup of CQ on Apple OS X

During the development phase, it sometimes becomes necessary to restore CQ to a particular state. To enable this, you can periodically take snapshots of the /crx-quickstart folder and its contents using the tar command.

E.g. below will create a snapshot backup called author.tar:
tar -zcf author.may20.tar crx-quickstart/*

It is not worthwhile to gzip this to save on storage because many of the files are already compressed.

To restore one of these snapshots (e.g. author.may20.tar), delete the existing /crx-quickstart folder with a command like this:

rm -r crx-quickstart

Then, run the following command to restore from the backup:
tar -zxf author.may20.tar

Also, see this for information on cloning CQ instances.