[thedanbob]

> Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.

And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.

[vardump]

I have 4x Time Machine backups. Hopefully I'm safe? Surely at least one of those separate independent backups should work?

[thedanbob]

I’ve come to the conclusion that Time Machine itself is fundamentally broken and wouldn’t trust it with any of my data. If I went back to using a Mac I’d find some other backup application.

On the other hand, all of my experiences were not recent; maybe Time Machine is fine now. Or maybe the corruption is random enough that you’re safe with 4 copies. In any case, I’d check on your backups regularly to make sure they’re still good.