Something doesn't compute here... If you've got an OS on your TM drive - I believe it was ganbustein who, a few years back, posted the option to make a TM drive bootable. - why do you boot into Recovery rather than the OS when you select the drive from an option boot screen?
I don’t. If I have my three drives running (Main, Super Duper, Time Machine) and I do a restart while holding down the Option key, all three drives appear. I can boot from The Main and the Super Duper but the Time Machine goes to the recovery screen that joemike posted.
To be clear….the Time Machine icon is exactly the same as the one on the desktop…green with the clock and counter-clockwise arrow circling it.
But if you erase the drive, which sounds like the entire drive, the OS would be erased and need to be reinstalled along with TM's being restarted, and it doesn't sound as if you do that.
Correct….I do a full erase and then select the drive to do a full Time Machine backup. I do not do, and never have done, any OS install on the Time Machine drive. However, neither have I excluded the System folder in the Time Machine Options so I assume that means the system automatically gets backed up.
