Re: Copying off Time Machine?

On Sep 30, 2012, at 1:31 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> On Sep 29, 2012, at 11:02 PM, Ashley Aitken wrote:
>> 
>> I wonder how Time Machine Starfield handles volumes that have changed?  I assume they must have the same path but does it need to be the same partition to restore to?
> 
> It'll restore wherever you want, but almost certainly aliases will not work. Seems very hit or miss.
> 
>> Does TM same Spotlight indices and other hidden information at the top level of partitions? So many question, but hopefully is just works.
> 
> Time Machine does not backup a lot of information. Spotlight is not backed up, it's recreated from scratch after a restore. All of your visible and hidden cache folders are not backedup and thus aren't restored.
> 
> If you do a full disk backup with Time Machine, and restore it, upon reboot you will find Gigabytes, possibly dozens of Gigabytes, of difference between the original and restored disk. At least initially. Once caches start to fill up again, and Spotlight reconstructs itself, you get close to where you were before. 


If you're interested in seeing some of the guts of what TimeMachine excludes by default, and if you select the option to exclude System Files, open these two config files in Xcode:

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/System.plist
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist

Further questions about Time Machine behavior can be found in the man pages for tmutil, including operations that you can't perform via the GUI.

Hope that helps!

Gil

Gilbert Wilson
Systems Administrator
The Omni Group
+1 206-523-4152
+1 206-523-5896 (Fax)