The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed.
I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.
I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).
I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.
I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).