Time machine backup, what is saved exactly?

Hi everyone. In anticipation of the newer models being unveiled this June I plan on selling my retina macbook pro.

First of all I bough mountain lion on that, what should I do when it comes to restoring it to factory settings? Does mountain lion stay on there? Do I have to buy it again? Or does it revert to its original factory os version?

Alright for the other stuff. I plan on using time machine to backup and restore everything. What gets saved exactly? All my programs, files, photos, etc with their activation keys and so forth? Or should I backup my photos, videos, and so on separately? How reliable are time machine backups?

Finally the restore process, when restoring on a new laptop does it overwrite the existing installation or does it install it in a separate partition?

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everything should be saved in time machine so you can use migration assistant (not time machine restore) on the new machine and have everything the same as the old machine copied from your time machine backup... some software will not survive licensing/activation when moving... and some will, it depends how the program is made... the software will move though, so some just may need to be re-activated.

Just keep your old machine as-is until your new machine is working... then just do a OS re-install on your old machine and turn it off when its at the place asking to set up a user account, so when the person you sell it to gets it, they can set it up the same as a new machine. Just hold down Opt when starting up and boot to the recovery partition, and you can do a OS re-install there. You can use disk utility in there to do a secure wipe if your paranoid the new user is going to try data recovery to get any of your old info off.

 

Thanks for the reply, why is it not recommended to use time machine restore over migration assistant?


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Time machine restore restores everything including the OS. You really don't want to do that while changing machines. Migration Assistant was made to be able to migrate from a time machine backup, so you can move to a new machine much cleaner without issues and still get all your settings and apps. You only time machine restore a whole machine if its the same physical machine.

 

Alright thanks for the clarification. I did my backup and I went ahead and sold the laptop. Can't wait for the new one to be announced.

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Not sure I'd take the risk, without multiple backups... hate to see something screw up with a backup and lose info... but it will probably be ok. I normally like to migrate to my new machine before getting rid of any data off the old one.

 

If the old machine is networked you can do migration directly from it and not have