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Time Machine: How to check that it's working?

M

MacNoobGuy

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 18, 2012
497
0
hey guys, i just ran Time Machine for the first time and it looks like everything worked ok. it completed the backup and will run another backup in 20 minutes. i was just wondering how i can check that my files are actually being backed up in case i had to restore the files. how would i go about restoring the files by the way?

thanks a lot

edit: i just noticed that my time machine drive is 4gb smaller than my mac internal HDD. is there any reason for this?
 
Last edited:
i just noticed that my time machine drive is 4gb smaller than my mac internal HDD. is there any reason for this?
 
im backing up the internal Mac HDD to the external TC drive. the TC drive is about 4GB smaller.

anyone know why?
 
There are files that don't get backed up by Time Machine, caches and other temporary system files that don't need backups. Your backups will never be exactly the same size as the original.

jW
 
ok thanks. so there's nothing for me to be worried about? time machine will basically take care of itself once i set it up?
 
MacNoobGuy said:
ok thanks. so there's nothing for me to be worried about? time machine will basically take care of itself once i set it up?
Click to expand...

For the most part. If you want to make sure, click the Time Machine icon in the menubar when it's not backing up, and see what it says the date of the last backup was. As long as it's the same day or recently enough, it's probably working fine. That will also indicate if there was a problem trying to back up.

What you don't want is for it to say that the last backup was two months ago, like mine does. Then again, I was messing with server-based Time Machine backups and I don't think I set something up quite right, so that's my fault and an unusual situation.

jW
 
ok thanks. so Time Machine basically creates an image of everything on the drive? if the drive died and had to replace it, would i be able to restore all of my files?
 
MacNoobGuy said:
ok thanks. so Time Machine basically creates an image of everything on the drive? if the drive died and had to replace it, would i be able to restore all of my files?
Click to expand...

It's not an image, per se, but yes, if your drive died, you would be able to restore everything from Time Machine. You'd need to boot from an install disk or recovery partition to do it, though, so make sure you know how to do that if necessary.

jW
 
Mal said:
It's not an image, per se, but yes, if your drive died, you would be able to restore everything from Time Machine. You'd need to boot from an install disk or recovery partition to do it, though, so make sure you know how to do that if necessary.

jW
Click to expand...

ok, thanks a lot. is it possible to restore the time machine backup from an external drive that's connected via a PC that's networked?
 
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