Mac Time Machine Backups

Cluster focuses on experiences with Time Machine backups on macOS, including recommendations for setup, restoration successes and failures, capacity issues, and alternatives like Carbon Copy Cloner during system recoveries or upgrades.

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TimeMachine SSD S3 M1 NVRAM OK TM apple.com XD NAS time machine machine backup mac restore apple external ssd backups disk

Sample Comments

protomyth Aug 4, 2012 View on HN

For a non-technical Mac user, I would hope someone mentioned buying an external hard drive for Time Machine. Seems to work fine for the normal case.

submeta Dec 14, 2024 View on HN

This is bad. - Just recently I broke my system badly. So I decided to erase my system and re-setup from time machine. After several unsuccessful attemts I realized that my Time Machine backup (1.45 tb) exceeded my ssd capacity (1 tb). I did research, and learned not to prune my Time Machine backups. As that may corrupt it. So after several days and failed attempts to restore from time machine and after some research and finding out that indeed it was still possible to boot from external ssd, I d

vincnetas Jun 28, 2018 View on HN

Have mac book air from 2013. Went through all OS upgrades with no reinstalls. Even upgraded SSD from 128 to 512 with flawless backup from timecapsule. Can't even image this happening on windows...

kalleboo Aug 24, 2023 View on HN

Oh awesome! I guess I need to delete and re-create my Time Machine backup to enable this.

wmf Oct 31, 2023 View on HN

I've used it successfully. My Mac died and I restored the Time Machine backup onto a new Mac perfectly.

weaksauce Aug 7, 2012 View on HN

That is terrible. Though, I don't understand why anyone would turn on a "find my Mac" feature that has the potential to wipe your entire hard drive remotely unless you have thorough backups. Time machine is dead easy to use; try pluging in a usb hard drive and it will ask you if you want to use this as a backup drive. Arc is something that anyone on the mac should use as well for backing up priceless pictures and files. It encrypts the files locally and then sends them to your amazon S3 bucket a

BonoboBoner Nov 2, 2011 View on HN

Or use TimeMachine if you are on a Mac.

togusa Oct 8, 2015 View on HN

When I had a Mac I used Carbon Copy Cloner to image the disks solving that entire problem. It creates bootable backups then which you can restore to exactly the original state. Time machine was a veritable pain in my arse on numerous occasions including one that nearly shafted everything I had. I genuinely don't trust it or HFS+ and never would ever again.TBH I've moved to Windows as a primary platform now and I'm just using Beyond Compare to sync my data by hand to bitlocker e

angulardragon03 Aug 20, 2024 View on HN

Target Disk Mode has a replacement on Apple Silicon, if you haven’t tried that out yet.https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/mac-help/mchlb37e8ca7/...

lonelappde May 28, 2020 View on HN

Is Time Machine or other backup tools affected too?