Does Time Machine make bootable backups?

I used a beautiful backup program called Backup Simplicity in Tiger that made a bootable Exact duplicate of my HD into my external drive. That's really I want to do.
This morning I tried Time Machine for the first time. It only put a backup folder on my external drive. That's not what I want to do.
So here's my question, if I totally erase my external drive will Time Machine make a bootable duplicate of my HD on my external drive also?
Also, is there a way to schedule Time Machine for backups manually?

No, TimeMachine doesn't create a bootable backup, nor can it be controlled manually. The purpose of TimeMachine is to work behind the scenes backing up changed files. Later, when you realize something is amiss, you can 'go back in time' and fix the problem. Admittedly, I'm a little shaky on the details of just how flexible the retrieval system is since I've not yet played with that feature yet. But as I understand it, if you installed a new program and your computer suddenly started going nuts, you'll be able to use TimeMachine to restore your computer to the point before you installed that program. Or, if you realize you improperly edited a file, you'll be able to retrieve the file prior to that editing session.
Apple's team realized three things: 1) most of us don't take the time to perform backups even though we know we should be doing it. 2) most of us don't really understand how to develop a good backup strategy. 3) computers today are so powerful that most of the time the CPU isn't working hard at all and those extra cycles might as well be put to use doing something useful. Hence, TimeMachine's design.
As you noticed, TimeMachine makes a folder and does its incremental backups inside. Since I have an external drive that is much larger than my boot/data drive, I'll continue to clone my boot drive to this external once a week, just as I've been doing. If disaster strikes and I need to use the computer right now, I can do so and at worst my data will be one week out of date. (I should then be able to use TimeMachine to retrieve the missing data but the important thing is that I'm up and running again as soon as I've rebooted.) Later (or if I have the time right away) I'll use TimeMachine to restore/replace my boot drive.

Similar Messages

Does Time Machine make complete backups of Virtual Machines?

I am new to the forums, so forgive me if this has been asked before.
I have a MacBook Pro and have VMWare Fusion 3 installed.
I have Windows 7 and XP installed as virtual machines, and use an external hard drive to back up into using Time Machine. I have been given conflicting information regarding the backups being created by Time Machine.
I have been told that I should use a Windows backup program such as Acronis to back up the Windows installations separately from the Mac backups on the separate hard drive.
Someone else has told me that if I use Time Machine, then the Windows installations will be backed up automatically, as the Windows installations are effectively folders and files within the Mac software.
Just to confuse things, I have read somewhere that Time Machine cannot back up Boot partitions of Windows installations, but I can't remember where I read this.
I don't want to lose my Windows installations through not understanding the backup capabilities of Time Machine, so I am hoping that someone here can advise me as to what the best course of action would be please.
Can I trust Time Machine to back everything up and to be able to restore my whole machine, including Windows installations, from a Time Machine backup, or do I need to back up the Windows virtual machines separately by using Acronis.
Thanks
Kevin

1. TM will not backup a Boot Camp Windows volume.
2. TM will backup a VM disc image every time it changes unless you have excluded it via TM's Exclude list.
3. If the VMs change often then TM will backup each change thus consuming large amounts of space on the backup drive which is not recommended. Thus, it's best to backup VMs separately from within Windows using a Windows backup utility.
4. TM will not backup individual files and folders of a VM disc image. It will only backup the entire disc image.

Does time machine do incrementals backups or full backups each time?

does time machine do incremental backups or full backups each time? in other words, is it only backing up changes or everything that itis told to backup?

+is it only backing up changes or everything that it is told to backup?+
Time Machine makes physical copies of new and changed files for each backup but it just establishes hard links to files previously backed up that still exist on the source rather than making new copies of them.
This Ars Technica article explains how the hard links work.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

If i move itune to external drive does time machine still have backup?

if i move itune to external drive does time machine still have backup?
I just moved my itunes off my macbook pro because it was taking up too much space and put it on an external hard drive. i have a second external hard drive that i use for time machine. when i update time machine next will my itunes files be removed from the backup since they are no longer on my internal hard drive (what time machine backs up?) basically, i want to make sure i have a second copy of my itunes besides the one on my first external hard drive and i was wondering if time machine will still have all of that data (on the second external hard drive).
i cant find this answer anywhere!!! thanks so much!!!

Check to see whether or not it's excluded in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences.
Items deleted from the hard drive won't be deleted from the backup until the backup location runs out of space.
(63157)

Does Time Machine make back-ups when nobody is logged on?

Hello,
Does Time Machine make back-ups when nobody is logged on and does it continue to back-up when I log off?
I'm using an directly connected external hard drive to back-up my data with Time Machine, the back-ups are encrypted.
Thanks in advance.

I had the same problem with Time Machine and solved it by enabling "Enable Power Nap" in Energy Saver:
System Preferences...
Energy Saver
Restore Defaults
Check "Enable Power Nap: While sleeping, your Mac can back up using Time Machine and periodically check for new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates."
2013 21.5 iMac
OSX Mavericks
Seagate 1 TB slim USB 3.0 (power is drawn from USB port), formatted to Mac Journaling File System

Time Machine makes full backup after permission repair.

I am struggling with this a couple of months but now I am sure. Each time I do a permission repair of my hard drive, Time Machine makes a full backup of roughly 200G. In this way my Time Machine disk can be full rather quickly. I seem not to be able to prevent this. Anybody having the same issue? Or, even better, having a solution? Thanks, Pierre

Thanks for your reaction.
No, only 10-20.
I do permission repair once every 4-6 weeks more or less as a kind of maintenance. No idea why but it happens to be like this.
This is in the log (and somewhere here the trouble occurred):
Jun 28 19:33:16 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 19:33:16 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 19:33:22 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[386]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 19:58:02 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 19:58:04 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[355]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 20:13:30 imac-ethernet fseventsd[48]: event logs in /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd out of sync with volume. destroying old logs. (930 2 930)
Jun 28 20:13:31 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 20:13:31 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 20:13:33 imac-ethernet fseventsd[48]: log dir: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 87C9B931-FE3E-48EF-818C-B78899942EB3
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 20:13:35 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[536]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 20:22:47 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 20:30:28 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 28 20:30:29 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[504]: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Jun 28 21:08:34 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[694]: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/iMac van Pierre.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
Jun 28 21:08:34 imac-ethernet com.apple.backupd[694]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Mounted devices (\n "/Volumes/pierre.wolters",\n "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups"\n)
Jun 28 21:08:37 imac-ethernet CleanMyMacHelperTool[727]: Wont clean Time Machine Backups because disk image
I will check your suggestions.
Once again, Thanks.
Pierre

Time machine makes 30 backups for the last two days, no backups for any earlier times: is there a way to control it?

I've been running Time Machine in the background for as long as I've owned my current Mac--- a few months. It is a completely generic set-up: it's a desktop (rarely shut off or asleep) connected to an external hard drive that is much larger (1 TB) than my internal hard drive (0.5 TB), and Time Machine is configured to save backups of my whole internal drive to the external drive. The external is half-full, and the internal is a little more than half-full. I often hear my external crunching away, working on something.
I recently needed to access an old file, so I went into Time Machine mode on the folder where it had been deleted a few weeks ago. While I'm not upset that it isn't available (it's my own fault for deleting it), I didn't expect the Time Machine to have such a bad distribution of saved backups. There are 30 backup snapshots of the past two days, and nothing earlier. I was expecting something more like a few from today, a few from this week, a few from this month, and a few going all the way back in time--- a broader distribution.
I don't see any way to control this in the Time Machine Preferences (in fact, very little control at all). Is there a secret way to control it, or some tip to ensure a more useful distribution of saved snapshots?
Thanks,
-- Jim

Thanks, but it doesn't exactly address my question. TimeMachineEditor allows me to set the intervals or times when backups occur, but it doesn't control the algorithm that decides which snapshots should be deleted. My problem was that Time Machine chose to delete all of the old snapshots and keep only the most recent ones: I'd like it to keep more of the recent ones than the old ones, but still keep some old ones.
In fact, the (unmodifyable) text on the Time Machine control panel says that it keeps:
hourly backups for the past 24 hours
daily backups for the past month
weekly backups for all previous months
That would be perfect if it were true.
Perhaps the algorithm did the wrong thing because the size of my internal hard drive varied quite a lot a few days ago: a process got out of control and used up all of my internal disk space. I killed the process and deleted its output (several times), so my internal disk eventually went back down to normal. Perhaps in the intervening hours, Time Machine made a backup, once an hour, and used up all of the external drive space. When it had to choose between keeping "weekly backups of previous months" and "hourly backups of the past 24 hours", it chose to keep hourly backups of the past 24 hours. This was the wrong choice in my case (it was the unwanted output) and is probably the wrong choice in most cases.
Is there a way to control the algorithm that decides which backups to keep and which to delete? I would have it delete the hourly, daily, and weekly backups in a way that preserves their relative distribution.
By the way, while I have made it sound like my problem was a runaway log file (something that would be easy to put in an excluded directory with Time Machine's "Options" button), it was a VirtualBox snapshot merge. The data in question are precious, but were unnecessarily copied many times while VirtualBox failed to merge them properly. I can't simply exclude a directory: I'm talking about a more general problem.
Thanks!
-- Jim

Why does time machine make a second/different backup after new installing a hard drive?

Hi all,
Long time reader, first time poster...
after having to install a new hard drive on my MacBook Pro, the new Time Machine backups are not recognising the original/older backups on the external hard drive connected via network router and has created a new/second backup caller 'xxx Mac Book Pro 1' instead of updating/reading the orginal 'xxx Mac Book Pro backup'?
Does anyone know why it did this? and more importantly how do i make it recgonise the original and stop making the secondary copy?
Thanks!

Hi gb69,
If you are having issues with Time Machine backups after a recent hardware change, you may find the following article helpful:
Time Machine: Troubleshooting backup issues
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3275
Regards,
- Brenden

Does Time Machine make Backup obsolete?

I am a relative novice to the world of Macs, but I have been a big fan of Backup. Now that I have Time Machine, I am wondering whether or not I even need Backup anymore. Any advice/guidance would certainly be appreciated.
Thanks.

If you use a .Mac account then Backup is useful for backing up certain elements of your user account to your iDisk. The iDisk is not useful as a backup device for TM. TM also does not eliminate the need for creating bootable clones because TM does not create a bootable clone.
TM is best seen as an elemental backup solution easy enough for anyone to use in order to encourage more users to create backups in order to avoid data loss.

Does Time Machine Make My Book Studio Sleep to Prevent Wear & Tear?

Hi. I don't use the WD SmartWare from Western Digital and have deleted it on my My Book Studio external backup for Time Machine. With just this external Firewire hardisk and Time Machine, does it make it do some kind of "sleep" so it won't have as much wear & tear or regardless of software or hadisks have this sleep feature built-in them? Thank you in advance.
Gbu.

Hard disk sleep is controlled by the Energy Saver preference pane. It doesn't always work with external hard drives.
About Energy Saver sleep and idle modes in Mac OS X

How does time machine handle initial backup after upgrading to Yosemite?

HI All,
I'm wondering if Time machine will create a "new" full backup of the system after I upgrade to Yosemite.
I'm trying to make sure I can backout (revert to previous backup of Mavericks) of the upgrade should I run into trouble.
Thanks,
Eddy817

besides restoring just one file, that is what Time machine DOES. See this article:
Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions -- 14. How do I restore my entire system?
If you are deeply concerned, you may want make a copy of your entire system before updating (Clone your old system) or Install onto a Blank drive and add your files to that.
If you make NO preparation and do not have a Backup, the only way to install a previous versions is to do so onto a Blank drive. Also, you must have PURCHASED (even for $0) a copy of Mavericks, or it will not be available for re-download.

How much extra space does time machine need to backup a 512gig drive?

... in practice, how big does my backup drive need to be for 512gig primary drive?
I know time machine does "snap shots". I can imagine this takes extra space over and above 512gig.
What's your experience here?
Thanks

Web Wizard wrote:
Any other solutions to this quandary?
Yes, go with a smaller drive and be content to have oldest backups deleted more often.
If you don't need hourly backups, you can get a smaller disk and clone with SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner. You can schedule a backup nightly, if that enough.
The advantage of having a clone is that it is bootable in case you run into trouble on your internal, you can boot from the external and keep right on working until you have the time to fix it. You can also run repair programs from that disk.
-mj

Time machine makes no backups - External HD is no longer recognized

My external HD is only used for backups with time machine.
About 30 days ago I took the usb out of my Mac, so the time machine did not work.
Now I put the usb back in my Mac and the external HD is not recognized any more. I did do nothing else with the HD.. I did a software update, thought that that would solve the problem, read a lot of suggestions on this forum, but i cannot solve it. Maybe you have a suggestion?

cobruijn wrote:
I took the usb out of my Mac
Welcome to Apple's discussion groups.
Did you dismount that drive first?
Now I put the usb back in my Mac and the external HD is not recognized any more.
Can you see that drive in Disk Utility? Have you tried a different USB port? Does the drive show any signs of working, such as noise or lights?

Why does Time Machine make two copies when backing up

I use Time Machine to back up to an external harddrive and it is duplicating files, how can I fix this?

Daisy Duke is a third party software app I bought on App Store that helps to find easily find files that you no longer want or need and delete to create more HD space. I don't believe that I reformatted the source volume, is there a way to check for that. I have been doing some research that talks about multiple users, DD did show me the files under two different users and I wonder if it showing me the file but is not really on there twice. As you can probably tell by now I can get around a computer for personal use but do not have much hardware or software experience.

Time machine make huge backups every time...

Since last weekend my Time Machine have been acting Up by making huge backups every time like 130 gb +. That started on Mavericks and now continued into Yosemite(I made the upgrade with the ankward belief that the upgrade would fix it...)
Is there a quick fix for this?

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the word "Starting" (without the quotes.) You should now see log messages with the words "Starting * backup," where * represents any of the words "automatic," "manual," or "standard."
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Note the timestamp of the last "Starting" message that corresponds to the beginning of an abnormal backup. Now
CLEAR THE WORD "Starting" FROM THE TEXT FIELD
so that all messages are showing, and scroll back in the log to the time you noted. Select the messages timestamped from then until the end of the backup, or the end of the log if that's not clear. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ If all you see are messages that contain the word "Starting," you didn't clear the text field.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Does Time Machine make bootable backups?

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