The hard drive in my wife's MacBook recently failed. She was using Safari with the laptop stationary on her desk when, out of the blue, the system locked up. On restarting (via the power button) all we got was a folder with a blinking question mark. We booted from the Leopard DVD and Disk Utility could not see an internal drive which, not unexpectedly, was making a tell-tale clicking noise. Our previous backup regime involved making a monthly archive using SuperDuper!, but luckily Simone was running Leopard and thus had a current back-up not more than an hour old on an attached USB drive. Would Time Machine successfully restore all her stuff to a replacement (larger) internal drive?
Having come across an article where Time Machine was used to migrate files to a new drive (not a crash situation), I was expecting to follow the same sequence involving booting from the Leopard DVD and choosing Restore System from Backup... from the Utilities menu. However, the MacBook was returned with a fresh copy of Leopard pre-installed, but requiring setting up. The screens we encountered were thus a little different, since we commenced our restorative journey using Leopard's Setup Assistant. If you suffer a hard drive crash and have a replacement drive onto which Leopard is already installed, here is what you can expect to see.
Setup Assistant
We began with the usual Leopard set-up screens (language etc.) and soon got to a screen advising "You can also transfer information from another volume on this Mac or your Time Machine backup.":
Clicking Learn More at this point advises what the Assistant will transfer:
- Network settings;
- User accounts, including preferences and e-mail;
- Documents;
- Applications.
Although Time Machine isn't mentioned, this list also applies to Time Machine backups. The screen also states:
Some of the transferred applications may require reinstallation. To play songs you purchased from the iTunes Store, deauthorize your old Mac and authorize your new Mac.
A couple of re-installations did prove necessary (see below), but of course there is no means to deauthorize the crashed drive for iTunes (although you can deauthorize all your computers via iTunes in one go).
Having chosen to restore from a Time Machine backup, we simply selected the external USB drive connected to the repaired MacBook:
The following screen tells you what the Time Machine backup contains and allows you to check you have enough disk space or de-select some items or users:
Once the transfer begins you'll see a progress bar, together with an estimate of the transfer time. Over USB 2.0 the Assistant estimated 2 hours to restore an almost-full 60GB drive, although in the event it took less than half this time:
After the transfer
Once the transfer had completed Mail prompted us to import previous messages. It appeared to do this reliably, re-creating all the nested folders Simone used to organize her POP e-mail:
The desktop looked exactly as it did before the crash: the same desktop background, the same dock and menu bar items, etc. We noticed only one difference, and that was a file on the desktop titled Transfer Warnings and Errors.rtf. Inside this file was:
The following application(s) may need to be re-installed:
- Missing Sync for Palm OS
Very helpful. We did this and then needed to reathorize iTunes as expected and, just like Ducan, had to deal with a number of seemingly spurious sync conflicts (although we don't use .Mac).
Simone noticed all the little cached favicons stored in Safari didn't show up—but they're among the data that are excluded by virtue of being recreatable.
We also had to re-apply System and Apple software updates since Time Machine evidently did not replace the DVD-installed versions with the more recent files from the Time Machine backup. One potential advantage here is that the MacBook now runs a "clean" version of Mac OS X 10.5.1, whereas previously the OS was updated from a 10.4.11 installation.
Finally, although not reported by the Setup Assistant, our network printer could not be recognized so it was also necessary to re-install the Canon multifunction software.
Conclusion
We're very impressed—not to mention greatly relieved. Making current backups with Time Machine couldn't be easier. Likewise using it to recover an entire computer when disaster strikes is simple, informative, and couldn't possibly involve any less anxiety. I've called on Time Machine on a number of occasions to recover individual files I accidentally deleted during the previous week or two. BTM (Before Time Machine) such files would simply not have made it into my monthly archive and been lost to digital oblivion. Although there are pitfalls in specific circumstances (follow the links in this article), for most users if you're not running Leopard with a built-in Time Machine, you're missing out.
Hard drives never die; they just get repurposed
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I only hear good news about Time Machine.
Here's hoping my ageing MacMini will limp along for a while longer, with a back-up hard-disk (that is more problematic than the Mini), until a new machine arrives - soon!
I've heard both good and not so good David—but we certainly can't complain. If you're having problems with your backup disk, maybe you could pair your new machine with a Time Capsule? It looks like a nice piece of kit which could perhaps be kept in a locked draw (for example) for an extra level of security.