Do not rely completely on Time Machine backups. I learnt the lesson in a painful way. My MBP crashed a few years back, and Apple decided to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, Time Machine detected this as a new laptop, and won't let me restore from the backups.
But Time Machine backups are just a folder with (yet another) folder per backup timestamp. It doesn't use deltas or anything fancy, unchanged files are just hard linked.
In other words, you can browse a Time Machine backup like any other filesystem. For instance, you could just use cp or rsync to restore an exact copy.
On a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme with external hard disk, the files live in some disk image IIRC, but even there it is generally not hard to restore files.
But Time Machine backups are just a folder with (yet another) folder per backup timestamp. It doesn't use deltas or anything fancy, unchanged files are just hard linked.
In other words, you can browse a Time Machine backup like any other filesystem. For instance, you could just use cp or rsync to restore an exact copy.
On a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme with external hard disk, the files live in some disk image IIRC, but even there it is generally not hard to restore files.