My Experience with Time Machine

Ask anyone who knows me - backing up is a passion for me. If you want to see me depressed, have me lose my photos/videos.

There is an old saying in the computer world - "It's not IF a hard drive is going to fail, it's a matter of WHEN". Although I am no stranger to hard drive failures, it did get me the other week. The HD in my Mac died - it was fine when I went to bed, but I awoke the next morning to find it going SUPER SLOW, then a reboot showed to me that it was, in fact, dead. A quick jaunt over to the Apple Store got me a brand new HD (at no cost, thanks to Apple Care, by the way), but it left me with a completely clean hard drive.

At this point, you would begn the task of restoring your hard drive. However, I did have Time Machine running via a Time Capsule, and I decided that I would try to restore from it.

The first screen show shows beginning of the restore via Migration Assistant.

I left Time Machine running over night (as it was restoring 300 gigs worth of data).

After it ran, I had my previous hard drive back! This even includes my background and all my settings/programs. A quick update to the system component and I was ready to go. Long Story short: I'm impressed. Time Machine has always been a good option for restoring files here and there, but I can attest that it actually serves very nicely for a full system restore.

Some things I have discovered though:

1. Give it time to assess the drive and make full estimation of size of directories/files. Also give it time in the restore (as it may take a LONG time to finalize)

2. Make sure that you have the same version of the operating system before the migration (the Apple Store put Leopard on my system, when I actually had Snow Leopard. When I went to try to restore from my Time Machine, it gave it all sorts of problems...thus I had to upgrade the system first, then do a system restore)

3. Do NOT name the temporary name of the system as the same as the drive you are going to restore. (For example: If your previous name of your mac installation was Administrator "X", and you have time machine backup "X" - If you have to do a restore, don't name your new directory/file structure as "X" as it will give you errors when you try to restore to it). Instead, name the new directory as something like "TEMP", restore "X" (both as Administrator), then delete TEMP.

4. If you need more of an immediate restore, try other programs such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper!

I have not personally restored from these, but many people have restore without incident. I personally use Super Duper (in this specific case, I didn't have a current Super Duper! backup, which was stupid on my part)

That's it! And as always, DON'T FORGET TO BACK-UP YOUR FILES! -JM