Comments on: How to backup your Mac – Easily and Securely

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:15:39 +0000

I had to use a little bit of a different strategy to make sure all of my Music/Movies/Photos were safe and accessible quickly in case of a failure. My setup can be seen here: http://bit.ly/10KpXT
.-= Brad´s last blog ..Dropbox: Easy Backups, File Sharing and Data Portability =-.

By: Chuck Lawson

Chuck Lawson — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:59:22 +0000

Hi Clay;

Glad it all worked out for you. As detailed in the post I linked, the issue with Time Machine is that some applications (often for good reason) keep Time Machine from backing up their files. If you had no problems, then you probably didn’t have any applications that fell in this category, although many of us do.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Time Machine (I use it myself), it’s just that it may not be a complete solution in and of itself for many folks.

By: Clay

Clay — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:32:32 +0000

Not sure I agree with your take on Time Machine. I hosed my iMac after a botched install of Windows using Boot Camp.

As a long time PC user, I had NO idea where to start to recover. So, I booted from disk 1 of OS X – one of the options available from disk was to recover from Time Machine.

In order to do a full recovery – I had to format the disk using Disk Utility which was also on the CD.

Long story short – Time Machine took 2.5 hours, but it recovered EVERYTHING as though it never happened. This happened on a Sunday morning around 8:00 AM. By Noon, I had reverted my iMac back to 7:00 AM that morning.

Time Machine works as the name implies. That was three weeks ago – if it excluded files, I’ve yet to find them.

Cheers!