It can be done from either Recovery or Installation USB.

All the backup will be restored to your disk, including the operating system (for example Yosemite).If you restore without installing an operating system: You can restore from a Time machine backup without or after installing an operating system. When the backup is completed, the hard drive will NOT be bootable, meaning that you can’t run macOS from your Time machine backup. The backup includes docker files, npm packages, your personal files etc. I’ve also noticed that when restoring from a backup you will need to sign in to App Store and iCloud again and Chrome extensions need to be re-installed. The rest of the exclusions are for system things like caches and databases that exist to index other files where the system can regenerate these databases after a restore.

Some of the more obvious user file exclusions are Trash, Document revisions and MobileBackups from the local Time Machine store are all excluded. It excludes log files, Spotlight indexes, caches, temporary files and trash (have a look: On OS X, what files are excluded by rule from a Time Machine backup?). Time Machine by default backs up nearly everything in your macOS partition. Backing up your devices to NAS using Time Machine No performance penalty from the second redundant drive and you still have protection the trade-off is you get a big performance penalty when the hot spare is activated (while it rebuilds) and there’s still a risk of the array failing if a second drive fails while the array is rebuilding. You may consider setting it up with SHR1 and a hot spare.

No penalty from simultaneous use as long as each use is on a different volume.

One drive needs to fail before there is a risk of data loss.

Slight performance penalty in situations where there is significant use from two sources.

Two drives need to fail before there is a risk of data loss.

The only advantage you would gain would be less loss of data if an array fails, but at the cost of a higher risk of array failure.

Let’s take an example a NAS with 4 x 6TBb drives. The advantage to creating multiple volumes comes when you are using different size drives, want different levels of redundancy, or have significantly different uses. That being said, in this case you want to just make one, and then create shares to logically organize things. You can use the Synology RAID calculator to help determine how you want to set up volumes. It’s important that before you start you understand the concept of volumes on Synology Diskstations, because that’s the first thing you will need to set up before you set up Time Machine backups.

Backup mac to synology