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I have 3 MacBooks and I made a Time Machine on one of them e.g macA and then restore it on the others macB and macC. Now I did some changes on macA (added files, deleted apps,...) and did a Time Machine backup again (incremental on the previous one). Is there a way to restore these changes on macB and macC without having to do a full Time Machine restore? Like I want the 3 Macs to be synchronised and similar to each other. Any advice?

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    IMHO, Time Machine is not the way to accomplish this. Not knowing the full explanation of why you want to keep three Macs in sync, and what needs synching, it's hard to come up with a definitive (or close to definitive) answer. Is it data in the standard Users folder structure that needs to be replicated, or files and folders outside this structure?
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 12:23
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    I would advice against the use of Time Machine as a syncing solution in general (just use rsync instead). You might be able to use tmutil compare for a one-off though.
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 12:23
  • @IconDaemon I want to keep the files and folders similar across them.
    – Tak
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 12:25
  • Can you please be a bit more specific about which files/folders specifically?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 12:30
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    This sounds like an ideal candidate for the built-in iCloud sync - support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh36832/10.15/mac/10.15
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 13:42

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It sounds more like a task for Carbon Copy Cloner. It will compare a source to a target and update everything that is different on the target.

Time machines are very partial to a certain device, as far as I know, and I imagine it would not be easy to coerce it into restoring multiple times over another device. I am not an expert, but my understanding is, that the use case for TimeMachine is to restore a backup onto the device it was taken on, or onto a virgin system. Or, using the Migration assistant, onto an existing system, but incrementally onto that system, in a way that, if you have a newer OS version on the target, MA wouldn't touch that, but it would only push the documents and apps; so my initial use of "incremental" is not totally adequate here, but I was a bit at a loss as to how better to describe it.

I am having the exact same question and Time Machine seems a bit cumbersome, more like a hack. CCC, on the contrary, will make an incremental sync. I just did the Migration, and am finding that Time Machine will not really allow me to keep my old machine around in case of an emergency, while keeping it updated to hit the ground running when my primary machine has a boo-boo. You can schedule CCC like you can TM, so, if you use your backup as a target disk at all times, you can keep very close syncs, so you never lose much data. Hopefully. But I will see how that works out. I travel a lot, and having two laptops in my hand luggage almost maxes out my allowance by itself on most airlines ;-) Last weekend it worked fine, but nobody weighed my rucksack ;-)

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