It doesn’t happen too often, but on the off chance a Mac ups and crashes, it’s not a pretty site. Long removed from the iconic Sad Mac, Apple’s OS X’s error messages are far less comforting, either scrolling down the screen as kernel panics or--in this author’s experience--frantic, intermittent flashing between an Apple logo, prohibition sign and question-marked folder after a routine restart.

Like a good Mac soldier, I quickly found my Leopard Upgrade DVD, loaded it, held down “C” and restarted. A permissions repair and disc verification later, the thought of losing years of columns was becoming all too real--plus I was in no mood for a complete system re-install.

At or around this time, I remembered Time Machine.

Like so many before, Time Machine originally lured me in with eye candy. But its real power is far greater than space-age graphics and file restores. Unbeknownst to me, on my external hard drive sat a clone of my entire iMac.

Like a good friend, Apple is there for you in your time of need.

Pick a day, any day

It gets better. Booting from the Leopard disk presents a new option under the “Utilities” menu: Restore System From Backup. An obligatory warning follows--Restoring your system erases all of the contents of the volume you select--and navigating to the penultimate screen provides a list of all available backups, neatly sorted by date and OS revision. Clicking begins the restore process, which took about 40 minutes on my 40GB machine.

Erased ... from existence!

Unfortunately, it intially didn't help. Whatever problem that crashed my machine, it was still present in the first two backups I tried. Finally on the third attempt--taking me back two days--my v10.5.5 machine was up and running, with my desktop, Safari history and recent items all intact. A beautiful thing.

Whether a virus (unlikely), maintenance script (possible) or user error (probable) caused my woes, I’ll never know, but a week later, all is well, both with my system and piece of mind.