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Time Machine do you trust it

knappeduivel said:
I would never rely on a single backup and I always have two workflows. Time Machine is most convenient, Carbon Copy Cloner most dependable.
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Same idea. Time Machine is great for retrieving the last good version of a file you just screwed up, or that you need to see an older version of.

A formal backup somewhere else for the case the whole OS goes down or the SSD/HDD dies horribly is still needed. Even with versioning turned on the formal backup won't have this morning's work, and Time Machine is tied to the current OS/Mac, and if you have TM on a partition of the same Mac, well, it's not crash proof.
 
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If you don't have it in 3 places — including at least 1 offsite — you don't have it.

You should test restoring from backups regularly. Do I do this? Not often enough.

Time Machine is great when you have to go and grab an earlier version of a file from yesterday or last week as well as provisioning a new machine but yeah I wouldn't rely on it as my only backup solution.

Arq Backups are really really good. https://www.arqbackup.com/
 
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I use Time Machine mainly just to recover accidentally deleted or corrupted files, or to go back to an older version of a file. It works great for that. It has saved me numerous times to be able to “go back in time.” But for data backup, I just manually copy all my data, app support, and preferences to a backup drive. I don’t upgrade in place. At least once a year, I go through the process of wiping and reloading everything from scratch. I have had better luck just starting fresh with a new OS rather than upgrading an existing install and potentially carrying over issues. And even though it is time consuming, I also get acquainted with new features and changes by having to rebuild my environment. Probably not a practical or desirable approach for those with really complicated setups (certainly not a solution for production/work environments) but works for me. Up until Mojave I used CCC which was great for point in time clones/backups. But starting with Catalina and protected volumes, it initially didn’t provide the same features as pre-Catalina so I stopped using it and never went back.
 
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I stopped using Time Machine a long time ago. Back-ups were very reliable. File recovery was not. That might have changed now....
 
joshuaiz said:
If you don't have it in 3 places — including at least 1 offsite — you don't have it.

You should test restoring from backups regularly. Do I do this? Not often enough.

Time Machine is great when you have to go and grab an earlier version of a file from yesterday or last week as well as provisioning a new machine but yeah I wouldn't rely on it as my only backup solution.

Arq Backups are really really good. https://www.arqbackup.com/
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Definitely having multiple backups is an important best practice. I got burned by relying on only a single backup drive in 2009 or thereabouts and ever since I always have three separate backup drives with 1yr, 6mo, 1mo and most recent which is usually no more than a few weeks old. I use Time Machine to recover anything I lose between now and my most recent backup.
 
kitKAC said:
You have to reinstall the macOS version you want to go back to and then migrate your data.
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Discovered this after a relative's main drive got corrupted. The TM backup wasn't compatible with the OS that was reinstalled. (Well it partially was, the data available was multiple years old.)

TM is great for single-file recovery on a working Mac. Do not rely on it for whole system backup.
 
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Just used a TM backup tonight to clone my MacBook Air M2 from a Mac Mini M4 backup via Migration Assistant — ~700 GB over TB4, around 30 minutes, zero issues. So yes, I trust it.

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Quick update: Air is back on Sequoia 15.7.5 and I'm honestly really happy with it. The DFU + 15.6.1 IPSW route worked, just a bit bumpy along the way — Apple ID activation spinner hung forever until I switched to "Use Device Password", and the setup assistant defaulting to US keyboard layout...
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The key shifts since Apple Silicon: CCC clones don't behave the way they used to (sealed system volume, signed snapshots), and TM on APFS is genuinely fast — *if* you skip the legacy network-image backups and use a direct-attached SSD or, better, a TB4 NVMe. That setup turns TM from "slow nightly chore" into "snapshot in seconds".

For what it's worth, I've been a CCC user since the very early versions and still have a current license — it's an excellent piece of software. But since I moved fully to Apple Silicon, I only use it for file-level backups now. For full system clones on AS, TM via Migration Assistant has just been the more reliable path.

Like most things it depends what you actually need and what you're willing to invest. But "TM is unreliable" usually translates to "I'm running it on slow spinning disk over Wi-Fi to a sparse bundle" — which yes, will frustrate anyone.
 
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The screen on my M4 MBA was damaged so I sent it to Apple. When it came back, it looked as if they had simply replaced my computer with a new one, and the hard drive only had the OS on it. When I tried to restore from my Time Machine backup, Migration Assistant got stuck on a bad sector and quit. I tried many different ways to work around this, but nothing worked and I had to use a backup of another Mac that, fortunately, was OK, though I lost some files. I don't see why Migration Assistant used with a TM backup doesn't ignore the bad sector(s) and just issue a warning that such and such a file is not backed up, especially since it does not reconstitute the OS.
 
I don’t trust Time Machine one bit. Backups and incremental backups are complex, and Time Machine is pretty simple - not to mention it adopts Apple’s “forward only” mentality.

When moving to a new machine I prefer to just do everything from scratch and get a clean start.

If there are some preference/settings you want to save, you can manually copy over the .plist file. For things like calendar, photos, etc you can just export a full archive and then re-import.

Doing it manually might take a bit longer, but I have never lost any data doing it that way either.
 
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I've always used it according to spec (directly attached disks) and sooner or later it's always taken a dump. The only time I use it now is backing up for immediate transfer to a new machine. My daily driver is CCC.
 
I use Time Machine locally, and it’s worked when I’ve needed to recover one or two files. I supplement it with cloud backup through Backblaze.
 
thistleknife said:
A lot of people here haven’t used Time Machine in the last 6-7 years, and a number of them are using unsupported Time Machine setups. Used in spec, I have not had any significant problems with it in over a decade, and I have been using it for the 19 years it has been in existence.
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Exactly this. Used with Apple Time Capsules and their Apple-native AFP protocol it is reliable. I say that as another user for the entire 19 years, and having been saved by it countless times.

What wasn't reliable was the times I tried to use my NAS running the Windows-native SMB (v2 or v3) protocol. Much hacking was required to get SMB to work with Time Machine and Apple file attributes generally.

It will be interesting to see if when AFP is dropped in the next version of MacOS whether Time Machine works better with SMB servers. I suspect Apple isn't really interested, to be candid: they much prefer people to use iCloud. Which, as everyone will be keen to point out, is not a backup.
 
AlixSPQR said:
Never expect to fully restore anything, it's too complicated.
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????

Not to sure of that, unless perhaps you mean for average users?

About a year ago I had the SSD on my Mac Pro die. Fortunately I had a spare, and my backups were on my NAS. Simple matter of restoring the backup from Carbon Copy Cloner to the new drive.

Of course, I'm using OCLP to run Sonoma on this 2009 Mac Pro, so because of that, I had one additional step. That was to reinstall the OS (and thus recreate the EFI partition). But when it was done I picked up right where I left off with no loss.
 
My old M1 MBP is set up as a Time Machine server. My backup disk is attached to it and shared on my local network, so my M5 Pro MBP can back up to it from anywhere on my home network.

I originally set this up a few years ago using my 2011 MBP, when the M1 was my main machine. The M1 took over when I got the M5 Pro.
 
joshuaiz said:
If you don't have it in 3 places — including at least 1 offsite — you don't have it.

You should test restoring from backups regularly. Do I do this? Not often enough.

Time Machine is great when you have to go and grab an earlier version of a file from yesterday or last week as well as provisioning a new machine but yeah I wouldn't rely on it as my only backup solution.

Arq Backups are really really good. https://www.arqbackup.com/
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That looks very interesting. Thanks!
 
kitKAC said:
Time Machine stopped including a full backup of macOS quite a few years ago (since the introduction of the SSV). You have to reinstall the macOS version you want to go back to and then migrate your data.
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Even that's not reliable. If the jump is substantial between versions and not just, say, 14.x to 15.x, if the machine then makes a full backup it is tied to the new OS. If you go back to the old OS and restore, TM will say the backup is not compatible anymore. This is why I always unplug my TM when doing OS updates as I got burned hard by this a few years ago.
 
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In answer to the OPs original question, no. In emergencies only. It is slower than molasses and there always seem to be a problem. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my main boot drive and then select all my essential stuff and back it up to my NAS or other high capacity RAID drive for safe keeping. I also use Dropbox for ‘offsite’ storage of essential data. Time Machine is a rather slow and basic back up. Whenever I have tried to recover anything from it, is has been a very slow and painful process.
 
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Apple_Robert said:
I would not solely rely on TM. I haven't found it to be reliable over the years. It would be a good idea to also include something like Carbon Copy Cloner.
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This is my experience - occasionally it will corrupt itself (external drive) and break the ability to unlock the enycrption and all the backups on the drive are gone.


maflynn said:
It saved my bacon numerous times, very happy with how apple implemented this. One could argue that the feature list is minimal, but it does two things really well. Backing up your data, and allowing you to restore your data.
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When time machine works, it's great. it's great for months/years at a time. But occasionally the storage location has a catastrophic failure.

I'd suggest at a minimum:
  • more than one Time Machine drive
    • The FileVault encryption seems to break due to minor issues like for example unsafely disconnecting the drive accidentally.
    • My two drives are a share on my NAS and an external I leave at work
  • preferably a second different method of backup - be it iCloud sync, or whatever

That said, the above advice goes for any backup solution - always assume one method may fail or get wiped out.

Have more than one backup mechanism, that way you're protected from failure.
 
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Thanks for all your opinions very interesting reading as I’m a novice at this would it be feasible to do a new TM so it’s fresh and upto date
 
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