Time Machine Question

[omeletpants]

Sorry for the stupid question about time machine. Does Time Machine back up the operating system or just files and settings

Thanks

 

[Apple fanboy]

Sorry for the stupid question about time machine. Does Time Machine back up the operating system or just files and settings

Thanks

Just files. If you want a bootable clone use Carbon Copy Clone or Superduper.

 

[KenAlan]

Just files. If you want a bootable clone use Carbon Copy Clone or Superduper.

That's wrong. Time Machine does indeed backup everything. It isn't a bootable backup (most typical users don't need that) but all of your system files are there and you can restore the entire drive from it.

 

[CoastalOR]

I agree that Time Machine will backup the OS.

Time Machine is kind of bootable. It will boot to the Recovery Partition on the Time Machine backup (the exception is El Capitan because there was a bug with El Capitan backups).