TimeMachine after OS upgrade

[danqi]

I have recently upgraded from Mavericks to Sierra. Before the upgrade I turned off TimeMachine.

Can I just turn it back on now or should I start over by erasing the drive and letting TimeMachine start fresh?

 

[jbarley]

If, Time Machine is your only backup - the only way you have of going back to a working system should you decide Sierra is not what you want.
Then I'd suggest you keep it around for awhile, at least until you are sure you want to go with Sierra.
Now if by chance you've already decided that Sierra is what you want, then go ahead a erase the HDD and start a fresh TM backup, keeping in mind that you just burnt that bridge.

 

[danqi]

I do have other pre-Sierra backups. For me the question is rather if I want to keep the ability to roll files back to different states (e.g. 1 month ago, 5 months ago, and so on) or if it is cleaner to start over.

 

[Taz Mangus]

I do have other pre-Sierra backups. For me the question is rather if I want to keep the ability to roll files back to different states (e.g. 1 month ago, 5 months ago, and so on) or if it is cleaner to start over.

You should be able to just turn Time Machine on. Keep in mind that when you do turn Time Machine on again, Tine Machine will probably think that everything needs to be backed up again. So your previous backups should be fine.

 

[Boyd01]

I updated my MacBook Air to Sierra a couple weeks ago. Did not change anything with Time Machine, it still automatically backs up to a 2TB Time Capsule and I also have an external drive that I occasionally connect. Everything works fine, although it took a really long time to do the initial backups after upgrading.

I would not want to rely solely on Time Machine backups however, I have several bootable Carbon Copy clones (from before an after the upgrade) as well.

 

[zorinlynx]

Hard drives are fairly cheap; you should have at least two time machine backups of your system anyway.

Switch to the second backup disk for the new install; once you have a few days of history you can safely start over on the old disk if you want, or just use them alternately from then on.