Does Time Machine provide the same capability as Windows Restore?

Hi - I am exploring backup and restore options for the MAC. I am most familiar with Windows and Windows Restore, where you can restore a Win machine back to the same state it was at a particular point in time ( including the OS and system files. Does Time Machine provide this same capability? Thanks in advance for your time.

Yes, it provides the ability to recover personal documents only or a complete snapshot of the operating system with applications, files and settings present during the time that snapshot was taken.
More info:
Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac

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HT201250 Does time machine compress the data in backup?

I have got to replace my internal hard drive so have to back up just everything to an ext drive.
When I use 'time machine' to back up to an external disk, does that disk have to be larger than the file size on my iMac?
Does Time machine compress the data?( eg will 1TB fit on a 500 gig external drive?)
Thanks

No, Time Machine doesn't compress the data. I recently started a new TIme Machine backup, and the first backup required the same amount of space as it was backing up (actually a little bit more during the backup process).

I have just upgraded to Mavericks and have been using Time Machine on an external disk with Snow Leopard. Can I continue to backup with Time Machine on the same external disk or do I need a new disk since the operating system has changed?

I have just upgraded to Mavericks and have been using Time Machine on an external disk with Snow Leopard. Can I continue to backup with Time Machine on the same external disk or do I need a new disk since the operating system has changed?

Hi there,
I found that Time Machine in Mavericks will sort it all out for you. You shouldn't need to buy another backup drive, unless you have insufficient space left and can't afford to delete whats on there. It should just work fine.

I am having sporadic issues after new hard drive install and recovery using Time Machine. The same sluggish response, start up screen pixelating...If I reinstall Lion will it wipe out other applications? My HD was formatted and partitioned correctly, I ha

I am having sporadic issues after new hard drive install and recovery using Time Machine. The same sluggish response, start up screen pixelating...If I reinstall Lion will it wipe out other applications? My HD was formatted and partitioned correctly, I have a late 2009 iMac.

Use the trackpad to scroll, thats what it was designed for. The scroll bars automatically disappear when not being used and will appear if you scroll up or down using the trackpad.
This is a user-to-user forum and most people will post on here if they have problems. You very rarely get people posting to say there update went smooth. The fact is the vast majority of Mountain Lion users will not be experiencing any major problems with the OS, or maybe with apps which are not compatible, but thats hardly Apple's fault if developers don't update their apps.

Is it possible to have multiple time machines on the same password protected network?

is it possible to have multiple time machines on the same password protected network? any insight would be helpful thanks

Youshould set one of them up to extend the wireless network. That one would not need an Ethernet connection and would allow your network to cover a broader area.

Can both an intel and a PPC mac use time machine on the same TC?

I just got a TC and have successfully used time machine with a MBP. I was about to install Leopard on my PPC eMac in order to use time machine on the TC but I wondered if they could both use the TC hard drive as it is currently formatted.
As I recall, intel macs use journaled GUID and PPC machines use another format.
Am I deluded?

I don't think there is a problem, and I believe others have reported in these forums that they're doing it.
There is a lot of confusion in this area compounded by a number of people who say that some of the Apple KB articles are wrong/misleading.
But in this case it's more a case of it doesn't matter - here is why.....
The Time Capsule disk comes formatted, you can erase the disk via the Airport Utility. That's the closest you can come to formatting and you don't have options - so it does whatever it needs to do to get it right.
The machines being backed up don't access the Time Capsule's disk(s) directly as they do on a locally attached disk. They do it via AFP network disk protocol and the Time Capsule disk is in effect insulated from the machine being backed up.
(As an aside, it's because of this - the differences in what can be done over AFP - that the Time Capsule stores the backups in a different file format)
If you add a USB attached drive to the Time Capsule you can also erase it with the Airport Utility as above. In my case, I've attached a USB drive to my Time Capsule. I never had the Time Capsule erase it, but before attaching it I attached it locally and formatted it GUID and HFSJ and it work just fine when attached to the Time Capsule. Does it have to be formatted that way - I don't know - all I know is in this one case what I did works which doesn't prove it has to be that way.
Message was edited by: Steve Holton

How does time machine use the external disk space??

does time machine back up only the changed or new stuff or does it back up everything? does this mean that if on "day one" it backed up 600 gb worth of data, the next back up on "day 2" would be 600gb+a few more things, or would it be 600gb+600gb+the few more things? Does it back up "day one" in a whole package and "day two" in another package, or does it back up "day one", plus only the different things made from "day one" to "day two""?
similarly, does it keep stuff from the first back up ever, plus anything new or modified in the following back ups, then when it is full, does it let just the oldest files drop off? or does it drop off everything from the initial backup? that is, if I had 20mb of changes would it erase only 20mb of data to make the new data fit, or would it erase all 600gb from say "day one"?
thanks for the answer!
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
<Email Edited by Host>

See Pondini's TM FAQs for starters.

Does Time Machine backup the Applications folder?

Hi everyone. I'm backing up my MBP with Time Machine with the intention of formatting and reinstalling ML. It's completed it's first backup, however the backup is 133GB and in Disk Utility it says I've used 220GB on my hard drive? What's happened to that 87GB? I've noticed also that on the Time Machine disk, the Applications folder is nowhere to be seen.... Has it backed up my applications? Why has it missed out 87GB of stuff? Thanks

Hi Steve, thanks for the reply.
Yes I've checked all that, applications is not in the exclude list, and the "used" value in disk utility is vastly different...
If you look at the number of files/folders on the Time Machine, it's almost half....

If I filled the system hard drive, and I'll delete anything on it, it's off and on the external drive, or can I safely clean the system hard drive and all that was done in the Time Machine in the same place, on an external hard drive and will remain ?

Please help

Time Machine does delete "old" backups, eventually. "Eventually" is controlled by whether or not you have used all of the space on the TM drive. If you have "more free space" on the TM drive, then nothing should be deleted yet.
If youd elete files from a system drive, and continue on the same TM set, TM does NOT scour all old records to purge missing files ... else the "time" part of "Time Machine" makes no sense.

HT201250 can I back up two different Macs using time machine to the same external hard drive?

I have a MacBook Pro and a Intel Power Mac Tower. The Power Mac is backed up to a 4 TB external hard drive using Time Machine. Can I also back up the MacBook Pro to the same 4TB hard drive using its time machine without altering any of the Power Macs backed up files on the 4TB hard drive?
Ed

Yes, as long as the backup drive is large enough.

How does Time Capsule handle the same files on multiple computers?

I'm a writer who works on my MacBook Pro, the family's desktop PC and soon hope to have my own Apple desktop.
Is it possible to have the most current document(s) available no matter which machine I'm on?
Does Time Capsule go to each computer, find the most recent version and back it up?
Does it even work with PCs?

Is it possible to have the most current document(s) available no matter which machine I'm on?
Sorry, but no.
Does Time Capsule go to each computer, find the most recent version and back it up?
Time Machine will backup any changes to each Mac hourly
Does it even work with PCs?
Only if you manually drag/drop or copy/paste PC files to the Time Capsule drive

Aperture 3 - does Time Machine backup the entire library when you modify it

Since installing Aperture 3 and importing my iPhoto library, I've noticed that my daily Time Machine backups are now ~40GB. My Aperture library is 60GB, so I guess it can't be doing a full backup of it every day but I'm suspicious that it's Aperture related. Anyone know how I can see what's going on?

The only way to test a back up is to do a restore.
FWIW Time Machine does incremental back ups - i.e it backs up the changes - rather than doing a whole back up each time.
There's a Time Machine forum here
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1342
with some very knowledgeable people posting on it.
Regards
TD

Two Time Machines from the same computer on one external drive?

Hello all. I tried searching for a similar situation but didn't see one.
I have a MBP running Leopard 10.5.8. Its Time Machine is located on an external mirrored raid LaCie drive.
I have installed Snow Leopard on a separate external LaCie d2 drive on its own partition. On a second partition of that drive is a clone of the MBP HD (with Leopard 10.5.8).
Can the external mirrored raid LaCie drive I use for Time Machine contain both of the Time Machine backups that are created by the same MBP - one when Leopoard is running, and another when Snow Leopard is running?
Thanks. I hope I've posed the question clearly enough to trigger thoughts. It's a brain twister for me ...

Can the external mirrored raid LaCie drive I use for Time Machine contain both of the Time Machine backups that are created by the same MBP - one when Leopoard is running, and another when Snow Leopard is running?
Yes, but it's not the best solution. A better solution is a separate drive or a separate volume on the same drive in order to keep the backups separate. In this way if anything happens to the Leopard backup volume it won't affect the SL backup volume.
If you do as you propose each system's backup will be separate but stored in the same Backups.backupd folder as long as you use a different Computer Name in each system. Your backup drive will need to be large enough to maintain full backups of each.

Very elementary doubt, but... can i use the rest free space of Airport Time Capsule as a Hard Drive (copy and paste files freely, from my MacAir SSD to the Time Capsule), besides use it with Time Machine at the same time?

Cant find it clearly in tutorials...

You can do it.. should you do it is another question.
Store files on the TC.
This is asked several times a day.. obviously people are struggling with their latest SSD being too small.
The TC is not suitable for network file server.. but many people having no choice press it into service as such.
Major issues.
1. No backup.. no way Time Machine can backup a network drive. No place to backup to.. So all your files will be at risk. Think this out very clearly.. how and to where are you going to backup your files. And you will need to buy a third party like CCC to do backup.
2. The TC cannot be partitioned and mixing TM backups and data is not great. It was and is and ever shall be a backup device for Time Machine.
3. The drive is slow to spin up and quick to spin down.. there is no control. In fact the TC is so lacking in controls for even the router side.. that you cannot do more than the most basic of setups.
The following are controls on the hard disk side.
Reformat it. You can name the share. You can do a full archive of the whole disk. This will go at a speed of aprox. 30-50GB/Hr so calculate how long an archive of a full 2TB will take.
4. iPhoto in particular can easily corrupt its entire library with wireless networking causing a disconnection to one photo. Even if you do this;;; do not move your photo library... you have been warned!!
Even apple btw say don’t do it.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5168 Although mostly about FAT32 it adds network drives.
5. iTunes can constantly lose connection to the library. The disk is slow to respond.. itunes on the computer will constantly spit out errors. Even in the midst of streaming the TC can spin down the disk due to caching.
6. Do not use any live files on the TC no matter what else you do.. if you edit files in whatever program the file must be on the local hard disk.
7. The only suitable location for most libraries is a computer. You can plug in an external hard disk.
Read pondini for some work arounds.
Q3 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html

Does Time Machine utilize the password I created in Disk Utility?

Using Disk Utility, I created a volume (confidential.dmg) which contains personal information. Within Disk Utility, I also elected to require a password to open this volume.
Using Time Machine, I back-up the entire contents of my Mac to a fire wire drive.
If someone had possession of my fire wire drive, would they have to know the password I created in order to open confidential.dmg? Or are there other ways someone else could access the contents of confidential.dmg?
Thanks

Time Machine will just back up the encrypted disk image so yes, if somebody had access to your Time Machine they'd still need to know the password if they wanted to open it.

Does Time Machine provide the same capability as Windows Restore?

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