cougarmeat

You like it so much you gave it two Pros?

Though I appreciate the info about much older machines and OS's, I'd think that info would be in a side article about older systems. When dealing with versions of OS X, I didn't see any mention of the commercial back products Carbon Copy or SuperDuper - both of which create a bootable volume. Also, it's one thing to create a bootable volume; it's another to boot from it. Maybe it was mentioned in the article, but I believe there's some combination of keys that must be pressed at startup, in order to boot from an external source.

I miss the days when I could simply select the StartUp Drive from system preferences. I'm sure IT departments are pleased that it isn't so easy anymore. But that was always the philosophical conundrum. In its early days, it unshackled the user from the IT department. Perhaps that's one reason, besides cost, companies opted Intel/Windows computers. The Mac gave users too much freedom.

What does being a "Tiktok User" have anything to do with this? It sounds more like the author is (not so) subtly trying to throw shade on TikTok. If the user had eaten oatmeal for breakfast the article title could have read "Oatmeal Eater Got conned ..." i.e. a hidden warning not to eat oatmeal.

The problem I have with trackers and similar "Alert" devices, is the frequency of their chirp is outside my hearing range. Chipolo addressed that somewhat by having their devices "play" a note on an ascending scale. It's too bad there isn't a way to set the Chrip's frequency (tone, not rate of occurrence). Because of my high-frequency loss, my hearing is above average at lower tones.

You suggested an incremental backup "setting" and mentioned a default "fill disk" setting. I couldn't find any setting for that in the options I was presented (M2 Mac, OS 14.4.1).

The one time I wanted to use a TimeMachine retrieval was to re-establish a wallpaper photo. It wasn't clear if I could just use TimeMachine to reset the system to some hours (or a day - whatever the increment) earlier, or just recover the wallpaper photo file (the laptop owner didn't know where she stored it).

I could see how to copy known files over but not reestablish to an earlier system status. The wallpaper photo wasn't in any obvious place.

For my own work, I set up an SSD for TimeMachine with a 2-hour increment. But you can't run from TimeMachine if your system drive goes down. So I use SuperDuper to make a nightly smart backup to a Clone. If there's a problem with the main drive, I can operate from the clone until the issue is resolved.

Note that there are 3rd party TimeMachine apps that provide more options - especially in scheduling.