Restoring An Entire Backup With Time Machine

Posted by Alec Feld on 12/2/07 in Apple, Home & Personal

I don’t backup. Correction, I didn’t back up. When Leopard was released into the wild, my MacBook Pro began backing up my data hourly, a good precaution. Just weeks after my external hard drive became overflowing with backups and Time Machine had been hard at work, 10.5.1 was released, which ended up causing more problems than it was supposed to fix. My Mac froze during the installation, and the OS, plus some of my files, became corrupt.

Prior to having Leopard and Time Machine, my first thought would have been to do an Archive and Install, an option in the OS install that keeps all of your files, moves them, and drops shiny new system folders in. Sadly, since many files were also corrupt an Archive and Install wouldn’t help me there. Luckily, I had those backups Time Machine had been making for the past couple of weeks. I plugged in my external hard drive, popped in my Leopard Install DVD, and started the restoration process.

The process to restore backups is unbelievably easy, and takes few clicks to start. When booted from the OS X DVD, click the Utilities menu, and choose “Restore from Time Machine backup”. Select the hard drive on which your backups are located, choose the destination drive, and choose which backup you wish to restore. Hit “Start”, and walk away. The restore process can take anywhere between 1 and 2 hours, so it’s best you walk away from your Mac for a bit. Your Mac will reboot, and depending on what backup you chose to restore, you’ll be right back where you left off.

However, my Time Machine restore was a bit botched. The first restore failed, and the second restore just didn’t work. Three times a charm, as the third restore worked perfectly. After booting back into Leopard, Time Machine (for some strange reason) wiped all of my previous backups, which contained one or two files I needed. In my case, this wasn’t a big deal; however, it’s still a major issue that needs some debugging.

Time Machine is included with Mac OS X Leopard, which retails for $129.95 at the Apple Store.

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Ravencub said on

December 2nd, 2007 at 11:28 am

After playing around with Leopard for a few weeks, I decided to do a clean install. I, too, backed up my iMac with Time Machine, so I felt fairly confident I would be able to recover my files completely.

I installed OS X Leopard with the format option so as to have a fresh install with no old bits of application clutter. It was very easy to restore from my Time Machine backup and I specified that I only wanted it to restore my documents - no applications.

My restore took several hours (I have lots of photos) and went without a hitch, but I was disappointed to see that while Time Machine did not install any applications into my Applications folder, it copied over a bunch of stuff into my Library folder related to some old applications. So, I actually ended up with some applications half installed, which I had to manually go through and clean up. In addition Time Machine did not copy some of my data files. For example, when I re-installed Bookpedia, none of my data was there. I, too, found that Time Machine no longer recognized my previous backups, but I was able to browse my last backup folder via Finder and retrieve the missing data. I recommend keeping your backup around for a few days to make sure you’re not missing anything important - I discovered several things missing.

Backing up with Time Machine is really as simple as click-and-forget-it. Restore, however, still requires some geek savvy.

Adam Nelson said on

December 2nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm

I also had Time Machine wipe all my previous backups recently too, and I’m not sure why. I had successful backups stretching back to November 2nd, then suddenly this past Thursday evening, Time Machine started taking a lot longer than usual. I investigated, and apparently TM was backing everything up again, because it had no previous backups.

I’m still not sure why it did that. The backup and source drives are perfectly fine, no hardware changed at all. The backup drive still had another 75GB free, so it should have completed the backup without issue.

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seyDoggy said on

December 3rd, 2007 at 7:20 pm

I have had a less than favorable experience with Time Machine recently. The fact that you had to try three times is the definite sign that Time Machine IS NOT ready for mainstream. That is counter-intuitive to what a backup program is really about. Here is a scathing and legthy review I did last week: http://www.nutmac.com/index.php/2007/11/30/time-machine-a-giant-leap-backward/

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Andre said on

December 10th, 2007 at 10:52 am

Time Machine just saved me. It worked perfectly using the install dvd and selecting restore from backup. LAptop is now 100% like before the fatal crash.

Gotta love it!

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