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.
spodesign
July 03, 2011 at 9:15pm
I have recently had to replace the hard drive on my less than 2 year old MacBook Pro. It was covered with Apple Care. I have been performing a "Restore" on it using my Time Capsule Backup, transferring everything, including the applications and all. I have some pretty high end applications being piped back into the computer. I'm guessing around 400-500 GB is being transferred back into the computer from the Time Capsule via ethernet cable. I started the restore Friday around noon and it is now Sunday 12:05 a.m. and it has reached about 75% of the total transfer. My question is, should I be a little maybe a lot alarmed at how long this is taking? I'm afraid to stop it at this point, I've gone this long, I might as well stick it out. On the other hand, I'm hoping that at the end of all of this time, it doesn't give me a message that the transfer has failed. It seems unusually long. I was told to use the ethernet connection rather than transferring using wireless because the ehternet would be faster. Anyone have any thoughts on this or may have experienced a similar situation? I just hope all this time transferring is for nothing.
hypnotoad
November 21, 2008 at 11:01am
from a networked Time Machine backup? I'm backing up to a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo using the Time Machine hacks posted in numerous places. It seems to be working, but I'm curious if the method in this article is possible from that drive (maybe if I plug it directly into the mac?).
Michael Simon
November 21, 2008 at 10:50pm
If no backups can be found, there is a prompt to plug in an external drive, so you can try and see if the network drive is recognized. I doubt it, though, since Leopard only likes to play with Airport and Time Capsule. If not, just plug the drive into a USB/FireWire port temporarily.
