Lesson 17: Manage Time Machine

Question 1

What can you back up with Time Machine?

Answer 1

Time Machine lets you back up your entire Mac, including system files, apps, music, photos, emails, and documents.

Question 2

How does Time Machine maintain a backup history of the file system?

Answer 2

Time Machine starts with a full copy of the file system to the backup disk.

Time Machine then maintains a list of changes to the file system, and every hour copies only the changes to the backup disk.

In the backup it creates a simulation of the full file system using hard links for files that have not changed.

Question 3

Which types of files are omitted from Time Machine backups?

Answer 3

Time Machine saves space by ignoring files that don’t need to be backed up — ones that can be re-created after a restoration.

Generally speaking, Time Machine ignores temporary files, Spotlight indexes, items in the Trash, and anything that can be considered a cache.

Software developers can also instruct Time Machine to ignore specific app data that does not need to be backed up.

Question 4

Why is Time Machine inefficient at backing up large databases?

Answer 4

Time Machine is inefficient at backing up large databases because it must back up the entire database file every time any change, no matter how small, is made to the database.

Question 5

What happens when you try to select an APFS volume as a Time Machine backup?

Answer 5

If you select a backup disk that is formatted as APFS, FAT32, or any other file system besides HFS Plus, Time Machine offers to reformat it into the supported format of HFS Plus.

Question 6

Which feature helps Time Machine restore data when your Time Machine backup disk isn’t available?

Answer 6

Time Machine creates local snapshots on your built-in startup disk to help when your backup disk isn’t available.

Question 7

What are the four ways you can restore data from a Time Machine backup?

Answer 7

Four methods for restoring from a Time Machine backup include the following:

1. Restore specific items from a Time Machine backup.
2. Restore with Migration Assistant.
3. Restore an entire system with macOS Recovery.
4. Manually restore with the Finder.