Ah yes, clearly a skill issue on my part. Thanks for that insight.
I'm sure you've never had the pleasure of working in a corporate environment where IT has banned Time Machine, external drives, and replacement machines that actually match your storage capacity. Where "backup and restore" means navigating a Kafkaesque ticketing system on your phone to get someone in a different timezone to temporarily unlock your account because you're now on an "untrusted device."
The actual data backup? 2-4 hours, worked fine. The rest was dealing with invalidated certificates, version mismatches in corporate "security" software (that ironically required Flash to be "compliant"), and finding a replacement machine that wasn't a 256GB base model when you need to restore from a larger drive.
But you're right - back when we were independent, before the corporate acquisition, Time Machine worked exactly as advertised. Two hours, everything restored perfectly. Then came the security theater that somehow made machines less secure while being infinitely more annoying to manage.
So yeah, clearly I'm just not good at "backups." Got it.
> As an Apple Silicon user, I doubt that. ;)
Feel free to doubt away - yours is definitely longer. For context: I'm comparing Windows vs Linux on the same dual-boot hardware (old Intel workhorse), not against whatever "M" you are running. Linux consistently delivers 40-45% better battery life than Windows on identical hardware. Still need the Windows partition for certain freelance client work, but working on eliminating that dependency entirely.