- Joined
- Jan 1, 2009
- Messages
- 15,508
- Reaction score
- 3,867
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Winchester, VA
- Your Mac's Specs
- MBP 16" 2023 (M3 Pro), iPhone 15 Pro, plus ATVs, AWatch, MacMinis (multiple)
I think that for a one-time backup TM is fine. It only gets dodgy in two areas, in my experience: networked drives and long-time backups. Networked drives use sparsebundles, which seem to me to be a bit more fragile than backups with the drive directly attached. Long-time backups have long chains of links for files that don't change much and if one of those chains gets mucked up, the older, unchanged files/folders can get "lost" in the backup. But a new TM backup, made for a single purpose, is basically a clone, just like CCC or SD would make.