Q: Will Time Machine Back Up Everything On My Mac?

By default, everything on the internal drive aside from cache and temporary files will be backed up.

(110684)

It should.

I'd make 2 backups on 2 different drives - oops happen. It can be either 2 Time Machine or Time Machine and a clone.

Clone  - Carbon Copy Cloner          (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)

Clone – Data Backup

Clone – Deja Vu

Clone  - SuperDuper

Clone - Synk

Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested

Commonly Used Backup Methods

Yup, it'll be a complete backup.

If you ever need to find a file you deleted (or a photo or whatever), you can enter Time Machine by clicking the Time Machine symbol in the status bar at the top of the screen and clicking Enter Time Machine. From the Time Machine interface, you can choose to go back in time to a date that the file existed. You can secondary-click on the file and choose Restore file_name to .... You can then pick where to deposit the file.

Time Machine can also restore your Mac to its last-backed-up state as well, but I find myself in the former scenario more often …

One caveat is if you also run Bootcamp. If you use it, then a TM backup is not very useful specifically of the Bootcamp volume.