Ensure complete backup of data with Time Machine

Hi all,

For school, I am going to need to hand in my macbook pro for a day with only Leopard and MS Office installed on it to get it 'accredited'. Of course I am not exactly planning to clear out my whole pc just for that, so I thought I'd just reformat it, hand it in, then put back the Time Machine backup I have so it's as if nothing happened.

Though, I'm somehow a bit worried that this might not work. How do I make sure that my Time Machine backup is complete enough to restore as an entire system, and not just drag my files back from the docs folder or something? I would like to include all settings, preferences, history, cookies, bookmarks, which icons are where on the desktop etc, does Time Machine do that?

This is something I've been trying to determine for a while now.. is my Time Machine backup good and restorable?

However, the best way to do what you are describing is to do a manual backup. Boot to the Mac OS X installation DVD, then use Disk Utility to make an image of your primary system drive, saved onto an external drive. You can then later use the same method (boot to DVD, Disk Utility) to restore you primary drive using the image you previously created.

I have restored twice from Time Machine backups and never lost a thing.

I've got another question

I know time machine only saves hourly backups for 24 hours, and daily backups for a month.

What happens in the following situation:

I copy some files to my harddrive from somewhere else. They get backed up by Time Machine. Then, 3 hours later, I delete the files.

Will the files stay on the backup regardless, or will they be discarded after a day because they aren't part of the official 'daily backup'? How does this work?

*bump*