Time Machine: How can you confirm a backup? Can you just delete the backup and it will automatically redo it?

Question

I use Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive. That external drive also has a lot of other photos and unique info on that drive, too.

I'm not sure my Time Machine backed up my whole computer because of the computer turned off in the middle of the first time I used it (recently).

Questions:

1. Is there a way to confirm that the backup on the Time Machine is complete?
2. Lets say I just want to redo the backup from scratch. I can't format the external drive since it has a lot of other unique info. How can I delete the Time Machine information and have Time Machine automatically redo the backup?

Answer 1

The first question, how can you be sure a backup has completed, is answered by checking the menubar Time Machine item. It will tell you the date of the last completed backup.

Secondly if you want to perform another complete Time Machine backup you can stop Time Machine, eject the Time Machine drive, plug in a fresh drive and re-enable Time Machine using that drive as the backup destination. A complete new backup will be performed.

You could also just delete everything on the original Time Machine drive but it is slightly more risky. If something bad happened before the new backup completed you would be without the backup you are not sure about and the new backup.

Answer 2

When TimeMachine runs if the previous backup was interrupted it will do a check to work out what it needs to do to run a complete backup.

Let it run and it will automatically give you a complete backup.

Also, in System Prefs - Time Machine, check the options to see if anything has been excluded. You can optionally exclude disks and folders - clearly you don't want that, so best to confirm it.