Time Machine question

[Mdv2]

The situation is as follows, I am currently experiencing a lot of issues, my Mac being unable to identify the WiFi printer and regular freezing without obvious reason being the main issues. Personally, I have never had a more buggy installation of OS X regardless of all the praise around here for ML.

Either way, I want to try and see if some of the issues can be tackled by installing a time machine back that I made right after doing a fresh install. Not having used Time Machine before, I would like to know if I can use a backup I made today to restore things.

So in other words when you use an old TM backup to reinstall OS X can you still use newer back ups for restoration of data?

 

[Julien]

Make a ML USB install drive and use this to install OSX and use TM for the data.

 

[Weaselboy]

The situation is as follows, I am currently experiencing a lot of issues, my Mac being unable to identify the WiFi printer and regular freezing without obvious reason being the main issues. Personally, I have never had a more buggy installation of OS X regardless of all the praise around here for ML.

Either way, I want to try and see if some of the issues can be tackled by installing a time machine back that I made right after doing a fresh install. Not having used Time Machine before, I would like to know if I can use a backup I made today to restore things.

So in other words when you use an old TM backup to reinstall OS X can you still use newer back ups for restoration of data?

Yes you can. Option key boot to the TM disk and it will run what looks just like the recovery console if you did a command-r boot. From there use Disk Utility to erase Macintosh HD, then click restore. You will get a window with a long list of dates showing each backup. Select the one you want to restore from and you will be all set.

This assumes your backup disk is large enough to hold enough versions of files for that old a version to still exist. If the fresh install was some time ago, it may have been archived off the backup set already if the disk got full.

 

[Edie Brickell]

I guess the OS X which you have installed on your Mac is creating problem. Just very curios what is the connection between OS X repair and time machine. If you are going to take backup of your data via time machine that is good for your future to avoid data loss disaster. But if you have your drive creating problem just fix it with disk utility by repairing its permissions.