- When it works.
It is great for individual file recovery though.
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Exactly. No one should depend on it. But it does come in handy sometimes and might save the day for someone who does not know as much as you do. 
And thatās why I always list it as only the first of three steps for a serious and effective backup plan.
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I have a dumb questions, but despite using Time Machine for as long as I can remember, I have never actually used it to do a full restore using Migration Assistant. After itās done, is it like the original computer? Meaning are all the apps installed, all the data in its place, and settings set as if you never had to restore the computer?
Pretty much all my backup solutions, are just about saving the raw data, so no matter what happens I would have to set everything up again.
I had to do that only once (I replaced the hard drive in my mumās 2014 Mac mini with an SSD; and then that SSD failed a while later), and yes, everything was properly restored back using Migration Assistant from a Time Machine backup (off a Synology NAS), including the apps and the settings.
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I made a fresh Time Machine backup of my Dadās Mac and used it to migrate to his new Mac and he got everything back. If you get your Applications folder as well as the Library folder hidden in your home folder, you shouldnāt have much, if anything, to set up again.
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This sort of depends. The last time I tried this, it didnāt restore my virtual machines in Docker or any of their content. I had to start that from scratch. A few other database style apps didnāt have any data. Half the files I store in GitHub were missing.
That being said, I donāt know if my experience was a bug or normal.
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So upgraded to Sequoia todayā¦no issue. Small first world problem, I had a complete brain fart and was trying to remember what my background was for my screen. Figured, you know what let me check our Time Machine and see if I can see a hint or sliver of some frame to help jog the memory.
Since this thread, my Mac Mini does 3 backups
- Backblaze
- CCC to a passport drive
- TM to NAS
Well, whenever I open TMā¦I just get a black screen. NAS is mounted and accessible, but each time I open TM from the windowā¦black screen. Unless I missed a step, I am now considering just attaching another passport drive to the Mac and doing TM from there instead.
Anyone ever encounter this?
What kind of NAS? Synology provides specific instructions for how to set up, Did you see that? My TimeMachine to Synology NAS works reliably. I use a dedicated login ID with a disk space allocation set for that ID. This how you did it?
Oh itās setup correctly and backs up. But actually trying to access and restore something is not intuitive. Each time I try to restore, itās a black screen and canāt see or do anything.
Iām going to stop using the NAS for TM backups and go back to just the passport drive. That was more reliable and intuitive. @tomalmy you are correct !
Sorry to hear you have that issue. On my macOS 13.7, LAN-wire connected Synology NAS 7.2.1 with plenty of disk space (the ID running the backups has a quota of 2.25 TB) ā¦
I opened TimeMachine to test a restore from 2022 (2 years ago) ā¦ able to restore (successfully) all my Scrivener projects from way back then. I had pulled the wires from the two USB spinning disks also setup to do hourly TimeMachine backups.
From my perspective, I find TimeMachine works exactly the same on USB drives as with Synology NAS, so I donāt concur with your comment about how the passport drive versions are more intuitive. The three destinations for TimeMachine all work to backup and restore with exactly the same end-user interface, just fine, far as I can tell. Just me.
I realise this not your experience. But wanted others to know of a different experience. Enjoy.