Has anyone installed and restored from a Time Machine backup?

[jfreed]

I'd love to install 10.11 on my iMac, but I don't want to spend countless hours re-installing all my apps and files. However, I do have a lot of crud on the machine. I've never restored from a Time Machine backup, so I'm not even sure how the process works.

So... has anyone restored from a backup and is it still blazing fast as it is on my 2010 Macbook Pro? Thoughts? Thanks!

 

[MikhailT]

Unfortunately, restoring from Time Machine will restore the most of the crud. That's the nature of the backups, it's not selective or intelligent enough to know what should or should not be restored.

I can tell you from my experience as I just did a clean install, it's freaking worth it. I first installed 10.11 as an update to Yosemite to play around it to see if all of my stuff will work including Parallels. As soon as I did and was happy with the performance, I did a clean install. It was a big improvement.

(My Yosemite install was an upgrade from Mavericks, which was upgraded from Mountain Lion, so definitely a lot of crap that piled up over time).

You'd want to read everyone's experience here: Am I reading correctly? El Capitan runs very stable?

 

[jfreed]

Unfortunately, restoring from Time Machine will restore the most of the crud. That's the nature of the backups, it's not selective or intelligent enough to know what should or should not be restored.

I can tell you from my experience as I just did a clean install, it's freaking worth it. I first installed 10.11 as an update to Yosemite to play around it to see if all of my stuff will work including Parallels. As soon as I did and was happy with the performance, I did a clean install. It was a big improvement.

(My Yosemite install was an upgrade from Mavericks, which was upgraded from Mountain Lion, so definitely a lot of crap that piled up over time).

You'd want to read everyone's experience here: Am I reading correctly? El Capitan runs very stable?

Well, I'm so ready to take the plunge. I'm completely blown away by the performance on my Macbook Pro. It's like having a new computer!

 

[MikhailT]

Yep, it does feel like a new computer, which helps as I can now wait more patiently for the next rMBP update.

What's even more impressive is that this is only beta 1 and we're 1-2 months behind of the build they showed at the keynote. The next beta should include a lot of changes.

 

[!!!]

I recently restored from Time Machine to Yosemite. It didn't make my Mac go that much faster. I would recommend installing El Cap to a second partition to your mac. That way you can still access your files and apps from your Mac HD, as well as protecting your main system from the buggy beta.

 

[MikhailT]

Impressively enough, I have less issues from the first beta of El Cap than I have with Yosemite, it is actually more stable.