Is time machine a good enough back up for the ML update?

[Dragoro]

I keep my mac backed up daily with time machine. Is that a good enough back up in case something happens when I install mountain lion?

 

[Silono]

Time machine, assuming you didn't tell it not to back some things up, will back up every single file on your computer, including system files. It would work just fine if you have to restore from it if the ML update goes awry. I had to do that once. Not with a major OS update, with a minor one. I think it was 10.6.4...

 

[Dragoro]

Okies thanks.

 

[KevinC867]

Time machine is certainly sufficient, but a cloned disk image would be much more convenient if something goes wrong. I combine a nightly incremental SuperDuper clone with my hourly Time Machine runs. Disc space is cheap. Time and data are precious.

 

[old-wiz]

I wouldn't run a major update without at least two backups. Never depend on a single backup, whether it's TM or a clone.

 

[AirThis]

It can take a very long time to restore a full backup of your machine with TM. Last time it took me 8 hours on my 2009 mini. Others have tried with more recent machines, and it's still quite a lengthy process. Make a clone instead.

 

[voidpresence]

time machine

I for one wouldn't use Time Machine to backup before an OS update: if things were to seriously mess up, time machine would not be accessible and make that backup useless.

Use a 3rd party backup with something like SuperDuper (and make sure it's on an external drive).

But overall, that's just to be safe.
There are more Mac users that have the latest version than any other OS, that wouldn't be the case if upgrading the OS was such a hastle (as it is with certain other OS's )

 

[theSeb]

I keep my mac backed up daily with time machine. Is that a good enough back up in case something happens when I install mountain lion?

It depends on whether you ever want to downgrade to Lion with a clean install in the future. If not, then you can proceed.

ML will overwrite the recovery partition on your Mac with recovery 10-8. This means that you will not be able to do a clean install of Lion again using the built in recovery tools on your Mac. However, you can rollback to Lion from Mountain Lion by doing a Time Machine restore. I have verified this.

If you're backing up to TM with OS X 10.7.2 or later, then you have a Lion recovery partition on your TM, which can be used to do a clean install of Lion, but I suspect that in the near future the time machine software will be updated to keep a Mountain Lion recovery partition instead of the Lion one.

I hope that makes sense.

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I for one wouldn't use Time Machine to backup before an OS update: if things were to seriously mess up, time machine would not be accessible and make that backup useless.

Use a 3rd party backup with something like SuperDuper (and make sure it's on an external drive).

But overall, that's just to be safe.
There are more Mac users that have the latest version than any other OS, that wouldn't be the case if upgrading the OS was such a hastle (as it is with certain other OS's )

If you're upgrading using OS X 10.7.2 or higher, then a time machine backup is bootable, even if you completely delete all of your partitions on your internal storage and be used to do a clean reinstall of Lion or to roll back to your previous setup.

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I wouldn't run a major update without at least two backups. Never depend on a single backup, whether it's TM or a clone.

If you use your computer for important stuff, like making money, checking out porn or writing a thesis, then this is the approach I would take.