Factory Resetting My rMBP 2012: Disk Cloning Question

To backup whether using a third-party program, or TimeMachine, you need to have an external hard drive for the backup. If you do not have one already, a source I use heavily is OWC, http://www.macsales.com and have four of their Mercury Elite Pro quad-interface drives...great performers.

You can make a TimeMachine backup or use Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper, or just use Disk Utility.

With Disk Utility, you can format the external hard drive, Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) and give it a name. Then use the Restore tab, drag the name of the internal storage to the Source block, drag the name of the external drive to the Destination block, then click Restore and when Disk Utility finishes you will have a bootable clone of the internal drive on the external drive.

CCC and SD can also do that, but Disk Utility is already part of Mac OS X so you need not buy another program.

When you then start to erase/install the internal drive, restart the computer holding the Command and R keys, so you are on the recovery partition, and from the Utilities drop down menu select Disk Utility. Select the internal storage, and Erase. When that finishes, quit Disk Utility and select Install Mac OS X and you will end up with a clean installation of the operating system.

But, a question before doing all of this,. what is the problem that causes you to want to do a clean install? Is there something that can just be fixed without all of this effort?

You should have 2 complete backups on 2 separate hard drives as drives do fail.