How to know if time machine is making full system backups

[burnedfaceless]

Long story short I tried to merge two partitions and wasn't able to. The logical answer was to format everything and restore a time machine backup.

Unfortunately the latest restorable system backup was done in April.

How do I ensure that time machine is making restorable system backups regularly?

Thanks I found an article that seemed to have an invalid sudo command.

[chscag]

You can gauge how much Time Machine is backing up by opening Time Machine from System Preferences while the backup is being performed. It will show you the amount of data which is being backed up. An initial TM backup with nothing excluded should backup everything. Thereafter, it will only backup what has changed.

[burnedfaceless]

Thanks for the reply.

So are all of the able to be used for a full system restore?

[MacInWin]

TM doesn't back up the OS itself, just your files. To restore, you should reinstall OSX, then restore everything else from TM.

[chas_m]

TM doesn't back up the OS itself, just your files. To restore, you should reinstall OSX, then restore everything else from TM.

This is incorrect.

Time Machine backs up *EVERYTHING* on the boot drive. No exceptions unless you the user choose to exclude something. It does indeed back up the OS, apps, etc *everything.*

What it does NOT do is back it up in a bootable form (ie a clone). But you can indeed do a FULL system restore from a TM backup.

[MacInWin]

You are correct. I was thinking bootable. Thank you, sir.

[TomServo]

This is incorrect.

Time Machine backs up *EVERYTHING* on the boot drive. No exceptions unless you the user choose to exclude something. It does indeed back up the OS, apps, etc *everything.*

What it does NOT do is back it up in a bootable form (ie a clone). But you can indeed do a FULL system restore from a TM backup.

I always wondered about that, that's for the info.

Cheers

Tom