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Restoring a Full System with Time Machine

Restoring a Full System with Time Machine

by , 5:00 PM EST, January 28th, 2008

In his Blog, Duncan Davidson described in detail the process of fully restoring his Mac from a Time Machine archive. The procedure involves the Mac OS X Leopard install disc and the selection of the dated archive to revert to. Mr. Davidson reported that the process passed the "Trust, but Verify" challenge with flying colors.

"Most of Apple’s marketing around Time Machine focuses on it’s ability to go back in time and pick out individual files that were deleted or lost sometime in the past. It’s only mentioned as a side thought that you can also use it to fully restore your hard drive in case of a crash. Restoring an entire disk, however, is the acid test of any backup system," Mr. Davidson wrote.


From Leopard Install Disc, Utilities Menu

Mr. Davidson published screen shots all along the way that show what one can expect when doing this kind of total system restore. In addition, he pointed out that the restore process does have some wrinkles that should be noted and that, by virtue of the way it works, the process is rather slow.

"In the morning, my system was fully restored," the author reported. "After rebooting, everything was right where I left it. Well, that’s not entirely true. Not quite everything was there. Time Machine doesn't back up data that can be reconstructed, such as caches and indexes. This means that Spotlight will have to rebuild its index and won’t be immediately available. It also means that when you launch Mail, it will think it’s the first time it’s been launched and will go through a “Welcome to Mail” process where it imports all of the mail messages that are on your system. It’s not downloading things from your IMAP server, just recreating its database."

There were some other small gotchas, according to Mr. Davidson: "Another thing I saw was that iTunes needed to be reauthorized. I guess the data needed for iTunes authorization doesn't get slurped up by Time Machine. Interestingly enough, however, is that I didn't need to reauthorize Adobe Creative Suite. That was nice, as I've already used both my authorizations—one on my desktop and one on my laptop—and wasn't looking forward to calling Adobe to ask them to reset things."

Mr. Davidson expressed his confidence in the Time Machine backup process. "In short, Time Machine passed the 'Trust, but Verify' challenge with flying colors. I’m pretty happy about that as it means that I can recommend that my friends and family..." he wrote. However, he also wisely advised that one should also keep a copy of all data offsite.

"Then again, if you’re currently not backing up at all, having even a single Time Machine backup volume is a massive improvement," he concluded.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:computerbandgeek Posts: 52 Joined: 09 Jun 2006
Subject: Forgotten Printers

Interestingly enough, I just did the same thing. Unfortunately for me, the time machine backup forgets about all networked printers, so my new restore needed to be set up and given the IPs of the printers, etc. Other than that the restore has worked like a charm for me.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: found a gotcha in Time Machine/Migration Assistant

Apple just replaced my defective MBP. I had an up-to-date Time Machine backup, so I thought that I could simply use the Migration Assistant to restore my files. However, I set up the new machine with the same User Name (both long and short) as on the old machine. Migration Assistant wanted me to rename the user account before it would do the migration, since the new machine already had been set up with an account name. Had I chosen to use a Time Machine restore during the Leopard setup, then MacOS X would have correctly used the Time Machine backup and created the correct user account. Now I'm in the process of separately restoring my applications and files from the Time Machine backup and I expect everything to work out OK.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: superduper

So, is this a nail in SuperDuper's coffin (Assuming we're talking about the forthcoming Leopard version of SD). Assuming one doesn't care about speed, seems like Time Machine could just take over the duty.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Time Machine Restore doesn't recognize itself

I attempted a full restore of my MacBook Pro via Time Machine and experienced much the same as Mr. Davidson -- it was wonderful and worked with nary a hitch.

However, the one caveat is that, once restored, when I plugged the external disk containing said Time Machine backup into my computer again, it STARTED OVER! Time Machine backups didn't just "pick up where they left off" -- they started all over from scratch. Bummer.

So while I didn't lose any current information, I did lose all of the backed up files that had been deleted -- so no more "going back in time" to restore individual files to the present.

Time Machine should do better than this, I think. It should recognize a previous backup (especially one its been restored from) and just start adding to it instead of erasing it and starting over.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Time Machine and Migration assistant worked perfectly!

I've done it twice because I was fooling around with Boot Camp. I reformatted my drive and then used the Leopard installer. Once the install was done then I was given the option to restore from Time Machine using the Migration assistant. I used that and everything was restored like I didn't even touch my original system. I did it twice and both times it worked perfectly!

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