Time Machine is one of the great new features in Mac OS X Leopard. And really, it's about time an operating system sported such an easy to use and automatic built in back up feature. 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. While setting up my new desktop, I took the opportunity to test out how well Time Machine works in a disk restore situation. As the saying goes: trust, but verify.
Restore Process
After totally setting up the new system the way I wanted it as well as throwing my personal data onto it, I made sure that Time Machine had one last checkpoint of the disk, and then shut the system down. I pulled out the 320GB hard drive it came with from the factory and put it aside. Then, I put in a brand new blank 750GB hard drive and booted from the Mac OS X Installation disk that came with my system.
Now, you might ask, "Why didn't you order the system with a 750GB or 1TB drive from the factory?" That's a good question. The reason is that Apple charges a markup on their hard drives and you can usually beat their pricing with not much effort. For example, to configure my Mac Pro with a 750GB hard drive in bay 1 would have cost $250 from Apple. I picked up an equivalent Seagate 7200.10--the same kind that Apple uses in their systems--from Fry's for $159 on sale. And, as a bonus, I get to keep the original 320GB hard drive. What's not to like? Even if you can't find them on sale, you can pick a Seagate 750GB disk from Amazon
Once booted, I formatted the new hard drive and then from the menu bar selected Utilities > Restore System from Backup... This brought up a dialog to let me select the Time Machine source drive to use. I'll be curious to see if the restore utility will be able to find Time Machine volumes on the network, say in Time Capsules, but that will be a test for another day. In any case, the only catch I can see is that your disk has to be visible to the system without any special drivers. This rules out putting your Time Machine volume into an external eSATA enclosure hooked up to a card that requires drivers to work. Most of you probably don't fall into the situation, so don't sweat it. Use a Firewire, USB, or extra internal disk and you're golden.
Once you've selected your Time Machine volume, you can select which snapshot to restore from. This is pretty nifty really, tho in most cases, you'll probably want the most recent.
Then, select the disk you want to restore your system to. In my case, this is the new system disk I'd installed and formatted. The other two disks on the list are my primary photography image library disks live inside the Mac Pro, so it was well worth double and triple checking the selection before continuing on.
After that, it's time to go off and enjoy a dinner or maybe just let the restore run overnight. In my case, I had something like 170GB of data on my boot drive and the restore tool estimated that it would take about two and a half hours. From watching a bit of the restore, it's obvious that it doesn't run at full disk copy speed. Instead, from listening to disk activity, it seems to work in chunks with a bit of a time gap between each chunk as it sorts out what to copy next.
Since I started this after midnight, I just went to bed and have no idea how long it actually took to restore. But, I wouldn't be surprised if it did indeed take around the estimated the restore tool gave me, though that estimate did increase to about three hours before I left the system to continue on through the night.
The Result
In the morning, my system was fully restored. 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.
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.
One last thing that was a bit weird: My address book hit a lot of conflicts on it's next sync with .Mac. The conflicts were bogus conflicts on data that didn't exist in people's records. But, I did step through them all manually and make sure that nothing was going to get whacked.
Despite these few little interesting behaviors, almost certainly caused by the need for all the various parts of the system to rebuild indexes and caches, the result is a perfectly running system.
Wrap Up and Conclusions
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--including my Dad who just bought an iMac not too long ago--can use Time Machine as a totally automatic backup mechanism. There are, however, two caveats to using Time Machine as your only backup strategy. The first is that you really should keep your data in at least three places and one of those places should be offsite. You should either continue with your existing offsite backup strategy for your most important documents or maybe you should consider rotating two disks as Time Machine volumes. Then again, if you're currently not backing up at all, having even a single Time Machine backup volume is a massive improvement.
The second caveat is that restoring from a Time Machine backup is not particularly fast. If you often find yourself on deadline, hitting a half-day's worth of downtime due to a hard drive crash might not be acceptable to you. In fact, if you have a hard drive crash, you may be looking at a full day's worth of downtime by the time you secure a new disk and install it. For folks like my Dad, this kind of thing isn't too big an inconvenience. You can start up a backup, go off and do something else, and come back to a restored system. However, it's the kind of thing that I'd like to try to avoid in my day to day work, especially when I'm on deadline. If this sounds like you, you'll want to look at having a ready copy of your boot volume by using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner. SuperDuper! has also been a great Mac OS X choice, but isn't quite ready for Leopard yet. Hopefully, it will be soon.
As far as what I'll do going forward, I've currently got a clone of my big new hard drive running to a another 750GB that's sitting in my external eSATA enclosure. Once it's done, I'll have the drive synchronized every day as well as keep a rotated second cloned drive off to the safe deposit box. If my primary drive goes out, my restore time will be measured in the time it takes to pull that drive out of the external enclosure and put it into bay 1 of the Mac Pro. I figure about 10 minutes, top. But, I'll be keeping the Time Machine backups going as well. After all, being able to recover that file that you accidently deleted last week is a great thing indeed.
Update: This post was linked to by TUAW and Ars Technica and there are some good comments on both of those pages as well as the excellent ones below. Also, thanks to Daring Fireball for the link love.
Update 2: Many commenters have pointed out that, in addition to not backing caches and the like, Time Machine also excludes quite a few other files like logs and what not. This causes some directories not to be recreated on a restore, such as the log directory for Apache. For quite a few users, this won't affect things, but it could affect some people. Devin Lane has posted a set of files and directories excluded by Time Machine that will be of interest to some people.
Elsewhere on the Net: Mike Soloman writes about having balls of steel and deleting his iTunes library on his laptop temporarily to make room for a project and then later restoring it. Yah. That's hard core.
I’d been wondering about this. Thanks for posting about your experience.
Does transferring over to the new system also move the inevitable sludge your system builds up over time? I’m wondering if rebuilding my system from a “clean” state would be better than Time Machining over. Great post.
Thanks for the article.
It should be noted that, though I’m a fan of Superduper!, at this time it’s still not compatible with Leopard. So for now, you can remove it as an alternative to Time Machine.
Thanks for writing and investigating this. I wasn’t aware if you could do this or not as it has not been heavily advertised or promoted. while I prefer a pure clone backup it’s nice to know about this option as we do have one machine is our office using Time Machine right now.
You said this:
“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.”
I did not know you could authorize two machines. I want to do
the same thing, my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro.
Or did you pay extra for this?
Dan
While this is theoretically interesting, I would advise the use of SuperDuper instead of Time Machine for this.
There are three disaster scenarios:
1. “Where’d that file go?!”: Use Time Machine.
2. “My hard disk crapped out!”: Use SuperDuper.
3. “My house burned down!”: This is the tricky one. Mozy is one answer, but it doesn’t handle hundreds of gigabytes well. And I grinned to myself when I read your safe deposit box solution: This will work for about two to three months, and then the time span between switch-outs will grow longer and longer as you weary of the hassle and grow complacent. The only backup solutions that work are those that require no human intervention at all, and are completely automatic, like Time Machine and SuperDuper.
SuperDuper doesn’t work with Leopard. They are working
on it. Right now Carbon Copy Cloner does work.
Dan
Just FYI, if Creative Suite had required that you reactivate, you could have used the laptop to revoke all your activations and then reactivate. Or at least you can with CS2 (I haven’t tried with CS3 yet).
@Dan
Everyone gets two activations. That doesn’t necessarily mean you get the legal right to install it in two different places (I have no idea if it does or not), but activation system will allow it.
> Does transferring over to the new system also move
> the inevitable sludge your system builds up over time?
Mac OS X does not “build up sludge” and slow down like Windows does. However, if you are having problems with the system, then a clean install will often fix it, as it also removes any third party plugins or drivers from the system as well. A clean install is simple and painless, unlike Windows.
The method above is not a clean install. It restores your system to exactly what was on the backup.
To do a clean install, just restart with the Leopard install disks. Click the Option button. Choose Clean Install preserving user and network settings. The whole process, including updating from the internet takes about two hours. All your data, settings, and Apps will be intact. You may have to reauthorize the Adobe Suite and things like that, but generally you’re good to go.
I used Time Machine as you did when replacing a notebook hard drive. There were a couple of other small bumps along the way:
1. After formatting the new hard drive, the new hard drive was not available as a destination to Time Machine restore. I had to reboot (from the OS DVD) to make it visible.
2. Apparently, the non-essential data that is not restored includes the data used to speed up Time Machine backups. The first backup I made of the newly restored disk took forever. Apparently, Time Machine had to scan the entire disk to determine which files needed to be backed up. That seems really stupid to me.
I recently restored my system from a Time Machine backup, and thought the whole process went smoothly until it was over. When I got everything back up and running, I turned Time Machine back on under my ‘new’ system. For some reason, I thought it would recognize where I left off and do a ‘differential’ backup, but it wanted to start anew. This totally makes sense in retrospect for a number of reasons, but for some reason I thought it would just pick up where it left off.
This wouldn’t be a problem, but since my backup drive is only slightly larger than twice the size of my internal disk, the new backup wouldn’t quite fit, so I had to trash the old Time Machine info. Just thought I’d pass this along so that others are aware if they’re in the same situation.
Will: As others have noted, a rebuild using your Time Machine backup—or any other backup really—won’t fix things in the same way that a clean install will.
Markg, Dan Riley: Indeed, SuperDuper! isn’t ready. I’ve altered the text to accommodate that. Hopefully it will be ready sooner rather than later.
Mark: I agree with your first two assessments and that’s exactly how I’m doing things currently. However, I did want to test the viability of restoring a system using Time Machine and I’m glad I did. It gives me confidence having another vector for data recovery.
As to point number 3, a safe deposit box is indeed a bit much of a hassle for most people. In my case, it’s less so as my bank branch is three small blocks away—about 1200’—which makes it a quick walk. Even better, it’s on the way to a nice cafe, several restaurants, and more. Just one of the many upsides of living in downtown Portland.
For most people, the best way to rotate offsite backups is to simple swap disks with one that they store at work. It works quite well for many people I know.
I would do an offsite backup automatically via the network, but I don’t have just hundreds of gigabytes. I’ve got just around a terabyte total. The economics don’t work out. I’ll have more to share about that soon as I’ve been doing some research on this topic.
Grover: I didn’t know you could revoke all your outstanding CS* activations. That’s nice to know. It could come in handy someday knowing that.
Alan: Indeed, you do have to boot off of a install disk. I mentioned this on the last line of the 2nd paragraph of the post. As to the first Time Machine backup after restore taking forever, I didn’t notice this. But, it may have taken forever in the background and I didn’t notice.
Chris: That’s odd and interesting. I haven’t noticed that on my local system here. After several Time Machine backups since my recovery, my Time Machine disk has just about the same amount of space free as my boot disk which indicates that there’s been no doubling up of data. I wonder what happened in your case.
Not only is SuperDuper “not ready,” it will seem to run just fine on Leopard while it happily screws up your data. I can testify to this.
If you’ve read something in this thread that makes you think its worth trying, think again.
I’m confused by the “Only complete backups of Mac OS X appear in the list” sentence in one of the screen captures. Because, reading this from here, it kinda sounds like you’re supposed to somehow make a full backup before you intend to have a hard drive crash. (I suppose it’s just scary wording rather than a really stupid limitation.)
This isn’t the first time I see someone suggesting rotating two Time Machine drives, and every time I wonder if Leopard could really handle that — don’t you risk ending up with two partial backup with the OS confused about what it thinks is on the drives? Has anyone tested that?
My point was that I had to boot off the system install disk twice. The first time to format the new hard drive. The second time to make the new formatted hard drive visible to Restore From Time Machine. The second reboot should not have been necessary. The hard drive was formatted and mounted. Apparently Restore From Time Machine does not update its volume tables after initialization.
Chris: In my case, although the first Time Machine backup of the new drive took a long time, it was not copying every file, just examining every file as if the hard drive was one it had never seen before. (I checked to be sure. I have 40 backups on my Time Machine drive, half from the old notebook drive and half from the new one. There is only one copy of mach.sym with 40 links to it.)
Obviously (per references to your Dad), you understand that Time Machine is aimed at the large percentage of folks who have no backup strategy at all. For you power users, who realize the importance of backing up your data and have previously addressed the issue using other tools, Time Machine may not meet each of your individual needs. And that’s ok. Apple’s stated goal has always been to provide a superior computing “experience.” I’m quite sure that preventing the average user from loosing all their data to a hard drive crash falls under that category.
Ross: Good to know. I’ve been holding off on SuperDuper! but know other that have been using it. Can’t wait till it’s out.
Garoo: I didn’t mean to imply you _had_ to make a backup before you crashed out, just that I did to make sure I had everything before embarking on this mission. I’m assuming that by full, it means “completed” such that you couldn’t restore from a backup that was incomplete. But I’m not sure there.
As far as rotating two Time Machine drives, it _seems_ that the only net effect is that you’d have large gaps in your history on each volume when they were disconnected. That _should_ be the only side effect. But, maybe that should be tested out.
Alan: Sorry, I misunderstood. FWIW, I didn’t have to reboot between setting up my new 750GB destination volume and actually doing the restore. I did it all in one go. I wonder why you saw that behavior. And thanks for digging through on the issue of the long first backup. It’s good to hear what was going on there.
Steven: Indeed, Time Machine is aimed at the general user. My aim was to validate that it did indeed work as advertised and to see how painful/painless the process was. But, in the process, I’ve gained enough confidence in it that I now consider it a valuable addition to my backup strategy. And, for secondary machines—such as my laptop which typically only contains transient data anyway—it may be the only strategy that’s needed.
Time Machine rocks. The hard disk on my wife’s Mac mini failed beginning of December. Luckily, I had switched her to Leopard and hooked up a spare disk to Time Machine a few weeks earlier. When her disk failed, I went out and got an additional external hard drive, then used Time Machine to restore to the new external disk. Worked perfectly. Now we just need to get that internal drive fixed…
It will be interesting to see whether Time Capsule will also have this Restore ability as well.
I have had absolutely no problems using SuperDuper with either my TiBook or intel iMac both of which are running Leopard. I can boot from either back up ppc or intel to the appropriate machine and everything is an exact clone of the the drives in the machines.
I like the app because of th eafore mentioned and also because my backups don’t grow anymore than the original drives!
One thing I have noticed (and it might be because I’m using a G5 that has a kernel panic every single day somewhere between 9 am and 1PM, regardless of how long the comp has been up): searching with spotlight often doesn’t reveal existing files unless I “go back in time” and restore them, which adds a copy to the existing installation. At this point, both the original and the restored files magically appear at the same time in the current files search window. I should add that I did a clean install followed by a complete restore and that those utilities that still work with leopard (like disk utility and memtest) show no hardware errors in the system.
Very annoying. And embarrassing when I can’t find logs of technical conversations I have had recently and then, suddenly, they are there.
Sadly, “Restore System from Backup” does not always work. The setup was a Mac Mini running off its internal harddrive with an external drive attached.
When the Mini had a hardware defect, it needed to be swapped out as fast as possible. So I bought another Mini and tried a system restore from the Time Machine Backup. It all went well until about 75% into the restore at which point it would always fail - no matter which backup I chose - among the Python files of the OS - and always a different one.
A system reinstall and restoring from Time Machine via the Migration Assistant worked, but it of course left me with lots and lots of setup work including the reinstall of MySQL and the reconstruction of the database from an SQL Dump as it had turned out that Time Machine only had a very, very old backup of the actual MySQL database files.
So, I can only recommend everyone to also persue an alternative backup strategy if they want to be sure they don’t loose any data. Time Machine is great when it works - but like all other software, it doesn’t always do so..
I had an alarming few hours after a TM restore on 10.5.0 where everything seemed fine until I tried to fire up Web Sharing and couldn’t get it work. The Apache2 folder was suddenly missing after the TM restore. After posting here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5740794�I eventually got a manual fix, but haven’t restored since 10.5.1 to see if this has been addressed.
Interesting read here :
http://murphymac.com/time-machine-some-details/
Very pretty site, and interesting article, but where is the feedback link? There is, for example, no way to report the typo “for for less less” in this article except by posting this comment.
I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro from it’s measly 5400RPM 80GB drive to a shiny new 7200RPM 200Gb Hitachi (7K200) drive and restored via Time Machine. It worked nicely and I experienced exactly the same things that you did. I’d only add that Time Machine also did not seem to restore my iTunes album art nor did it restore my buddy icons in Adium. Other than that it worked as advertised!
“Comment by Steve Didier at 2008/01/27 23:49 PST
I have had absolutely no problems using SuperDuper with either my TiBook or intel iMac both of which are running Leopard.”
That’s great for you. But the problems with superduper are well documented by the creator of the program. So please don’t give the false premise that all is well with superduper. It’s not.
There are some other files whose missing-ness can be a problem: specifically /var/spool contents.
http://use.perl.org/~rjbs/journal/35467
I did this exact procedure to upgrade my PB G4 from 80 GB to 160 GB (although I guess I could have upgraded to a 250 GB, but OfficeMax only had a 160 GB EIDE drive during their fifteen percent off everything in a grocery bag sale).
I wished I had found this article before my upgrade so I would have known about the iTunes authorization issue, which I found one morning days after when I hooked up my iPod for an update. Deauthorizing your current system should have been in the instructions from Apple, but that’s life with a potentially dead system.
On SuperDuper, I switched to Time Machine after I got several Leopard backups that refused to boot. I’ll keep it around for my pre-Leopard systems, but I’m using Time Machine for my Leopard systems.
Because of my infrequent backups (and my family’s even less frequent backups), I’m waiting with baited breath for Time Capsule. With only one desktop system (a Mac Mini G4) and a bunch of ‘books in the household, wireless backups will be the best way to keep things constantly backed up.
I actually tested this on October 28, 2007, the second I got my hands on Leopard :) I wrote about it here, and added an addendum today answering a previously asked question in this thread:
“What happens if you temporarily pause using one Time Machine backup disk, begin using a second, and then switch back to the first? Does Time Machine “catch up” on those missed days? Well, for a sample of one, I can say ... yes.”
This might be out of the scope of your test, but if you had more than one user account on your crashed hard drive would the test easily have restored all accounts to the new drive?
Saad: Given that Time Machine works with OS X Server, I’d expect the Restore from Backup utility to be able to go out on the network and find it. We’ll see, however.
Peter N Lewis: I’m currently rebuilding the site. For now, the best way to leave feedback is just the way you did it. Thanks for the typo catch.
Peter, Roger Herbert, and Ricardo Signes: Thanks for the links. I’ll check those out and report back on what I see when I get back to home tonight.
Richard Bock: It was outside the scope of my test. I had only a single user. It’s a good question that would be interesting to hear. But, given that the entire hard drive is picked up, I’d think it’d be likely to work just fine.
Interesting. I had an experience with Time Machine restore too when my MacBook Pro crashed frequently in iTunes and Safari after installing Security Update 2007-009 v1.1
As a result, I chose a slightly different restore method - installing Leopard first (10.5.0) - and then selectively restoring once Leopard is installed (i.e. there’s a prompt to restore files or copy from another backup, I believe it was right after the Leopard intro video).
Obviously this required a bit more work updating the system back to 10.5.1 with Security Update 2007-009 v1.1 (which curiously no longer crashed) but otherwise, the experience was exactly the same - everything worked, apart from Mail and Spotlight having to rebuild its database, and iTunes re-authorisation. Didn’t have a problem with .Mac – (er, because I don’t use .Mac).
Had a minor problem with an iPhoto folder and had to set-up my printer again, but otherwise still a big time saver.
In the screenshot of choosing the backup to restore from: What does “Only complete backups of Mac OS X appear” mean? Would any backup that has system files be there, but none other? I do backup the system files, but just want to clarify for others.
“This might be out of the scope of your test, but if you had more than one user account on your crashed hard drive would the test easily have restored all accounts to the new drive?”
Yes, it my test all user accounts were restored.
I have used time machine a few times now to restore a system and for the most part it’s been fantastic and as a side note, you can restore a powerpc system to a Intel Architecture, I’ve tried it both ways.
I can also vouch for Time Machine working very effectively to restore a hard drive volume. In my case, the drive could no longer read the file system not long after I upgraded to Leopard 10.5.0.
This issue came up once before, in which case I used TechTool Deluxe to repair the file system. This time that option was no longer open (TechTool had not yet been updated for Leopard), so I had the choice of either restoring the entire drive volume using my Tiger backup (created using RSyncX) or using the Time Machine backup that had just been created a few hours earlier. I chose the Time Machine backup, and the whole thing went very smoothly.
For an average user, I can’t imagine a simpler or more intuitive backup tool. Just plug in an external USB drive, switch on Time Machine, and forget about it until you actually need it.
Did the new system continue making backup to the same Time Machine backupdb? That is, can you fly back to the days of your old disk from the new setup?
“it’s about time an operating system sported a built in back up feature”
They’re nowhere near as good as Time Machine, but both Vista and Ubuntu provide built-in backup tools.
Is something wrong with Ghost, or Carbon Copy Cloner, or driveimage .XML or any one of the other stand alone products that do this just as well.
Henri Sivonen: Indeed, I can go back to before my restore in Time Machine. I didn’t have to jump through any hoops. It just worked™. I do having missing directories in in /var/opt, which other people have commented on.
Phil Wilson: Fair enough. I’ve updated my intro paragraph accordingly.
Boomerang: Nothing is wrong with those other products. I’ve only used SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. Currently, I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner for my cloning needs in addition to Time Machine.
Interesting article. If I understand correctly, I will still require SuperDuper! (once fixed) if my drive crashes since I cannot boot from my Time Machine backup?
Jeroen: Not at all. You can boot off of any Leopard Install DVD and restore from a Time Machine backup.
Thanks Duncan. I was referring to Mark post @ 2008/01/27. Any reason why he recommends using SuperDuper?
Is 1,200 feet down the road offsite enough?
I’ve just had to go through a restore after getting a corrupted boot disk.
It’s probably worth linking to Devan Lane’s list of Time Machine exclusions: [url=http://shiftedbits.org/2007/10/31/time-machine-exclusions/]http://shiftedbits.org/2007/10/31/time-machine-exclusions/[/url]
I’ve just been bitten hard by discovering that /home is there. I’ve 15 years projects and svn repositories there of Thankfully, I still have a Backup.app weekly backup.
It looks like a lot of locally stored POP mail didn’t make a reappearance.
Before the crash, I had 3.75GB free, now I’ve 26GB!!!
Paul McGrane: I’ve actually been waiting for that question. Thanks for asking!
In my case, the 1200’ between my home office and the bank safe deposit box is probably as good as anything within 5 miles or so. The major weather risks here in Portland are fairly mild. No hurricanes and not much much in the way of tornadoes. And, even if there were, both where I live and my bank are in reinforced concrete structures. The biggest weather risk is probably flooding, but my home office is 70’ above street level, so I’m probably OK there.
As far as other risks go, every building around for many blocks is a concrete structure and is sprinklered, so major fires spreading over blocks are probably a low risk. From there, the risks get to be quite broad in scope, such as earthquakes and what not. If those were to arise, at least I’m betting on the performance of two different structures and not just one. And, to get my data far enough offsite on a frequent enough basis to protect against those kind of risks needs a much different solution.
I’ve actually been contemplating a solution to this problem that I may put into play soon. We’ll see.
SImon: Good link. I’ll propagate that up to the main article.
I had a snafu where I had to use the Migration Assistant to restore part of my data (long story). However, when I restore my user data, I get some files which have “Restricted Access” and it won’t let me access them. Any ideas on getting around this?
Maybe some of you will be interested about this free software.
The experimental Clonezilla 20080204-hardy or later (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115473&package_id=233347)
now supports Mac OS bare metal backup and recovery in a Intel-based Mac. It was tested successfully in a Mac mini with Leopard and Ubuntu 7.04 installed.
Warren, I had to delete an entire user account with 50 GB because of an issue with TIme Machine. Its not worked right for me since the very first day. It silently failed and when I tried to recover, I had errors. All my drives check out fine until I update to the latest and greatest version of Leopard and then Apple’s disk utility refuses to verify permissions. At which point, Time Machine won’t use the drives (brand new, pristine, as I said).
Other than then having several copies of various hard drives strewn on 3 drives totalling 1.5 TB of data, much of which I have had to copy by hand to consolidate into one working system, I must say that Time Machine is a marvelous product and I highly recommend it to all SPARC users…
Thanks for the article. My PowerMac G4 disk went chirp, wrrrrhh, clunk, chirp, wrrrrrh, clunk in an endless loop yesterday… I knew there had to be a way to kick off a Time Machine full restore but Apple didn’t really document the process very well. I Googled and found your posting.
I managed to buy a new HD, install it, boot up from the Leopard DVD, run Disk Utility to partition/format it. Then ran the Restore. For some reason it didn’t recognize the disk but opening Disk Utility and clicking the mount/unmount button to dismount and remount did the trick.
It’s currently restoring and I am damn glad I had started using Time Machine a few months ago! If this works, my wife will be most happy! This will be the easiest restore from backup I’ve ever had to do that’s for sure! A big sloppy wet thank you to Apple for this feature!
Hopefully, I don’t run into any weird Time Machine bugs that are supposed to be fixed in 10.5.2 which is still not shipping yet. Last developer notes stated to test Time Machine…
Great article, and reassuring TM works as expected. I’ve linked to your article from my blog. Hope that’s ok?
Richard
Had the same experience as Matt in the last post, but when I re booted a third time from the DVD it finally recognized the disk.
The only thing that didn’t work perfectly after the full restore was ironically, Time Machine. I wanted to just jump back in and start backing up from where I left off, and still keep my older backups as I did during the last months.
But it started a new backupdb. and I could get the older backups.
And then I only had 16 MB left since the older backup was lying there. What to do?
While Time Machine saved my life (when the HD crashed), it did seem to have a few bumps. Along with some of the stuff above (itunes album art, Mail, etc.), I ran across a problem after the restore that was pretty troubling. Once I was back up and running, I set up TM again on the same external as before. And part of the process of backing up the newly restored drive included deleting all of the previous backup data. I don’t know why TM did this [without asking]. Though it didn’t cause me any big problems, I could see how it would for some people. I don’t see why TM could just pickup from where it left off.
Hey! What the hell do I have to do to get a little attention around here?
Evil
I upgraded my MacBook Pro’s internal HD this weekend and used this as a guide.
It was beautiful and all of my authorizations carried over beautifully.
Except for one Horrible glitch.
The Macintosh HD had permissions set to where I could only read!
Applications, too. In fact using the padlock>plus sign>my name>read/write set would crash finder for the Applications folder.
I tried Apply to enclosed items at the mac HD level, and that was a horrible mistake.
I now reinstalled the OS and am currently using Migration Assistant from my old HD (the same data that was on the Last Good TM backup, which was february 7th)
Its Sunday night. There went my weekend.
sudo chown root:admin /
sudo chmod 775 /
sudo chmod +t /
fixed it like that (after another trial “i hope this works” restore from backup)
then i followed the steps here: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6179654#6179654
Do the restored Mail messages are flagged as new/unread/unreplied or are displayed correctly?
personally I use Thunderbird that has one large database per inbox -
How does Time Machine work with something like Thunderbird? each new message sent or received might change a 1 GB archive file. would Time machine make a copy of each version every hour or so?
And how does it work with a Lightroom database/ previews?
Stefano, yes. Each tiny change to the database file will cause TM to make a new backup. Apple discourage developers from using self-contained storage systems and want them to use the OS X file system natively.
Just did my first restore of the boot disk. Could only choose dates of full backups, but it restored files created after the chosen date. Strange, but that was what I wanted anyhow.
Thanks for this info! its a great help.
I wonder if anyone can answer the question; will Time Machine restore all my applications like ilife 08 and iwork 08, toast, adium...etc as well? or will i need to reinstall / reactivate them all too?
Great Blog, thanks again!
Yes Sammy, it will copy over all apps w/their settings. Caches are the only small snags, which will work themselves out anyhow.
thanks Phil!
I’ve done a quick scan but I don’t think my question has been answered yet....
Somehow, through sheer good luck, I find myself about to receive a completely new iMac from Apple as my old one (a G5) has a dead screen and they can’t source the parts to repair it. If I choose to restore my system from Time Machine when I get my new iMac, will this write over all application data on the new iMac? Can I selectively restore applications, rather than just ticking a box to restore all applications? An example: My old iMac (and hence the Time Machine backup) had iLife 06. Will this write over iLife 08?
Thanks for all the other useful info!
Great Blog.
I have a question.
I use TM to backup my iMac G5. I have 4 partitions each of which TM seems to backup (I can see the partitions as files on my TM drive).
Now my new Mac Pro (yay!) arrives today and I want to be able to use TM to restore my existing backup onto my new machine.
How will TM handle my multiple partitions when it comes to a restore on my new machine?
When I boot up from the install DVD on my new machine do I need to partition the new drive in a similar manner and naming convention as my current drive (albeit bigger partition sizes as the new HD is larger) - or will just hitting Restore automatically restore all the partitions for me?
One other thing - are there any ramifications using TM to restore from a PPC to an Intel based machine?
Any input is most welcomed - especially as the Pro is arriving TODAY! :)
*scratches head*
As mentioned by several of the above including Chris, Mike M, and Staffan, the complete restore function seems to work except that Time Machine eliminated all the old backups save the one restored from and then proceeded to write a completely new backup on the same disk (while no longer recognizing the old backup for incremental storage). In other words you can still see the information but in effect you have to start all over again with Time Machine and all those old files you thought you were saving from two months ago are gone forever. See discussion at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6179417�So proceed with caution on full restore use of time machine
Just FWIW, SuperDuper is now ready for use on Leopard. Great product, highly recommended.
This is probably one of the most helpful threads i've read on the subject. but i was wondering if anyone knew if a restore from a time machine backup would bring back song ratings in itunes. i use ratings to make my smart playlists and it's always something i've ran into in the past as far as recreating my library? i know it won't do album art, but maybe ratings?.....
How do I restore iCal info? I had no problem restoring iCal from Time Machine but it restored the application only- none of the data I had entered. Thanks.