[strogonoff]

I recall permission issues when I needed to recover a couple of files from a Time Machine backup from an old machine without restoring the whole volume. Made sense, I somehow worked around it though. Not sure I entered the old system’s credentials, I might have used the terminal with sudo or something, but memory is hazy.

Personally no issues with TM, except when it was working for too long initially I decided to wipe it and restart from scratch. (Don’t think it helped speed it up.)

That said I spend some time carefully picking which folders to include in the backup to avoid slowness and bloat.

[dkonofalski]

Again, though, isn't that intentional? If it wasn't, what would stop someone from, for example, stealing a Time Machine HDD and then having access to all the files on it? It's one thing to steal the origin machine but I was under the impression that TM is specifically designed not to allow access from other user accounts unless you know the credentials for the original account from which the backups are created. Is that not accurate? That seems like a giant security hole if it's not...

[dividedbyzero]

> That said I spend some time carefully picking which folders to include in the backup to avoid slowness and bloat.

What directories do you exclude? I feel like there must be lots of superfluous stuff in my backups but I don't understand macOS well enough to know for sure.

[wila]

Not OP, but you should exclude large files such as VMs [0] as those don't work well with Time Machine.

Disclaimer: I am the author of Vimalin [1], the tool that Howard references as a possible solution for VM backups.

[0] https://eclecticlight.co/2020/03/02/time-machine-15-large-fi...

[1] https://vimalin.com