Time Machine Questions

[V6Pony]

Just started using Time Machine to backup my MBP. I have an external drive connected to my Airport Extreme. All seems to be going well. I have some questions:

1. Do you trust Time Machine to be your only back up?

2. Seems to me that you can do a full restore or find a missing file from TM. Is it good enough to trust all your pictures and music too?

3. If you buy a new MBP can you migrate you files or do a complete install?

4. Can you have it back up just one or two times a day? Just a single home user don't need backed up every hour.

Thanks

[mrplow]

Just started using Time Machine to backup my MBP. I have an external drive connected to my Airport Extreme. All seems to be going well. I have some questions:

1. Do you trust Time Machine to be your only back up?

I've never had an issue but I and others use CarbonCopyCloner too

2. Seems to me that you can do a full restore or find a missing file from TM. Is it good enough to trust all your pictures and music too?

You can, see answer above

3. If you buy a new MBP can you migrate you files or do a complete install?

You need an OS in place (as you would on a new machine). You can then use the migration assistant to bring everything or particular parts back.

4. Can you have it back up just one or two times a day? Just a single home user don't need backed up every hour.

There are third party tools but as it only ever backs up changes there is little or no overhead in having it run with default settings

[osxx]

It does hourly,weekly and monthly and I have used it since day one without a problem.

[RadDave]

Hi V6Pony - you've received great advice, so my comments will simply add to those already mentioned and provide a few additional considerations. Over the years, I've had at least 3 external BU HDDs fail, thus you should never rely on just one BU strategy - redundancy is the rule - below is what I've done on my two Apple computers (after a lot of reading and much advice from members in this forum).

MBPro: 1) Time Machine; 2) CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner); 3) Bootable USB drive; and 4) La Cie external SSD for my own files (docs/pics/music).

iMac: 1) Time Machine; 2) CCC; and 3) Carbonite (online storage of personal files mainly) - bootable USB drive will work w/ either computer.

Now another consideration would be to keep a backup 'offsite' in case of a physical disaster (fire, storm, etc.). SO, bottom line is that you need to do 'something' more - Dave

[V6Pony]

Thanks for the info all. Very good info. I also own CCC and can do a clone as well. Guess it would be a good idea to get a second HD to do a clone to. Just using this drive to clone then power it off.

[MacInWin]

I trust TM, but i don't trust hardware, so I TM to one drive, CCC to a second drive. Sounds like your plan is good, so go with it. I also use Time Machine Scheduler, an application that lets me schedule TM backups instead of them happening every hour. I do my backups twice a day, twelve hours apart, and my CCC clone once a day. My files are not that volatile, so I don't mind if I lose a day's work.

[ScaryFatKidGT]

I just TM to an external, actually only did it to move to a new comp, never had anyback up before ha

[harryb2448]

Cloning with SuperDuper is my preferred option. Either SD or CCC will be bootable if you have an internal drive crash, something that TM is not. With SD best option is to have current OS on a USB thumb drive as no Recovery partition is constructed at this stage.

[chas_m]

I must point out that you already have redundancy, even if you only back up to Time Machine. Your redundant copy is ... the boot drive itself! If you make a backup of it, you now have two copies of everything on it. That's redundancy. What you want sounds more like infinite recursion!

Anyway, as a lot of others have said I keep two backups as well ... Time Machine (which I had some issues with in the early days, but haven't had a problem in years now), and a Carbon Copy Clone onto a second unit (a bootable clone makes troubleshooting easier, and stands in when I want to "nuke and pave" the boot drive for optimization purposes). So I have double redundancy.