Using Time Machine to clone..

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Hi all - forgive me if this is basic, but will time machine give me an exact clone of my system (3 separate drives) including software etc?

Ive just aquired a 2TB external drive to backup onto, but am not sure if, in the event of disaster, my software would be recoverable as well as files and other data.

Thanks!
 
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No, Time Machine is not a ' Clone ' and you can not boot from a Time Machine backup.
Time Machine will make incremental backups but it is not a clone.

If you want a clone, try SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.
A lot of members on the forum use one of these.

Cheers ... McBie
 

dtravis7


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You can not boot STRAIGHT from the Time Machine backup however and I have done this 20 times now, boot with the OSX DVD and select restore from Time Machine backup and it's all there and works just like it did before you backed it up.

The beauty of CCC and SD are you can boot straight from the backup drive.
 
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Thanks for the replies guys - Carbon Copy Cloner looks great - but Im not sure I will need to actually boot from a backup drive, I just needed to be sure that my software would be 'backed up' and able to reinstall as well as everything else should it all go pear shaped.
 
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The ability to boot from a cloned disk can be a life saver, because you reduce your downtime whilst waiting for a failed disk to be replaced .... just continue working.

Just a thought.

Cheers ... McBie
 
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Way... way too many specs to list.
The ability to boot from a cloned disk can be a life saver, because you reduce your downtime whilst waiting for a failed disk to be replaced .... just continue working.

Just a thought.

Cheers ... McBie

Yep, it can be. Especially since a clean install of Lion (over the Internet) took me 3+ hours.. just to download the OS.. a couple weeks ago. The 'geniuses' at the apple store had ALL heard my complaint before.
 

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