Filed under: Blogging, Leopard
Restoring your Mac from a Time Machine backup
Time Machine is probably the defining feature in Mac OS X Leopard. It provides a nice, clean interface for you to backup and restore your files; but did you know you can also restore your computer from the Time Machine backup? When you insert the Leopard install disk and boot off of it you will be presented with a semi-Mac OS X desktop. In the menu bar, select Utilities and then "Restore System from Backup..." Select your backup drive, the date you want to backup from, and then click restore.
James Duncan Davidson has a full guide on his website describing how the process went. He mentions that while it restores all the files, the caches and databases are not restored. This means when you launch programs such as Mail the application will need to recreate the database, which may take some time.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
chrisa said 9:22PM on 1-27-2008
it's funny how much tuaw relies on john gruber's site for content.
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Michael Rose said 12:00AM on 1-28-2008
Uh, sorry, not this time. Duncan Davidson tweeted regarding his blog post, which is where we saw it.
mandel said 9:30PM on 1-27-2008
I just did this on Friday, and was very pleased at how well it went. I hadn't done a SuperDuper clone of my drive for months, and was waiting for the Leopard version to do another, but had just started Time Machine backups a week or two ago. I backed it up one night, the next day my wife dropped something on my MacBook Pro, and the hard drive was toast. One new hard drive later, an hour or so of restore time, and everything was exactly the way it was the night of my last backup - files, applications, the lot. Very easy.
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Aleks said 9:42PM on 1-27-2008
I haven't look into this enough so please forgive my ignorance but what if you are one of those users who just installs a lot of pro applications and slowly tend to fudge up your system over time?
In other words, I want to do a clean format and restore certain files or certain folders. I am not interested in restoring parts of the ~/Library folder I have messed up over time. Is this possible?
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Scott said 10:04PM on 1-27-2008
Not Directly, but you can use a Time Machine backup as a source for Migration Assistant. From there you can exclude your Library.
Fernando said 9:43PM on 1-27-2008
It also works when reinstalling mac os from the dvd, such a nice feature
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oshawapilot said 10:00PM on 1-27-2008
I just restored from Time Machine earlier this evening trying (fruitlessly, I might add) to remedy a HD partition problem.
After completely formatting and reinstalling I let Time Machine do it's magic. When I came home a few hours later my iMac was sitting at the login window as if nothing had ever happened.
Spectacular.
Now, only if I could get my damn hard drive to realize it's a 320 gig model, not a 237 gig model...but that's another story.
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William Beem said 10:19PM on 1-27-2008
I love and hate Time Machine. When my 500GB drive fills up, it first ERASES ALL OF MY BACKUPS and then tells me about it.
It's a great concept with an incredibly stupid implementation of a fatal flaw.
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K said 12:43AM on 1-28-2008
it shouldnt do that, mine deletes the oldest back ups but leaves the others untouched as it needs more space
I have a 500 gb and it gives me about two weeks of back ups before a deletes the oldest. There arent alot of preferences in time machine either, you might wanna open up a bug
I didnt know Time machine worked this way, a friend I swayed into the mac fold, had a hard drive fail and I went to reinstall and what I thought was gonna be hours getting it back to "normal"moving stuff one by one only to see the time machine logo and man was I glad. I gave her an old drive a bit ago just to get her started on time machine, it barely has enough room for one full back up but it was enough and worked great, no problems at all.
rich said 10:23PM on 1-27-2008
i have system files and default applications (including hidden unix files) excluded from Time Machine's backups. does anyone know if i will be able to restore my mac after reinstalling the system? like the system files, default applications, and unix files are on the install DVD.
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omnitech said 1:37AM on 1-28-2008
Just did this for a client. Restore went flawlessly, except now for some reason the old TM drive is read-only and I can't restore any of the permissions (am having to fix by cloning TM to another drive, re-formatting TM drive, then clone back). I also recommend some extra steps you can take to have your machine re-recognize your TM drive (if it is not accidentally read-only!) and fix permissions, etc, here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1307738
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Jake said 11:35PM on 1-27-2008
When I did this my songs bought from the iTunes store needed to be authorized again. Also Time Machine stopped working so I had to start my backups from scratch.
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JDK INC said 12:06AM on 1-28-2008
Does anyone know if when I receive my Time Capsule if I will be able to transfer my current Time Machine backups to it? I can't seem to see anyone who has asked that question yet, but I will have 6 months of backups on my current HD by the time Time Capsule comes to my door.
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mandel said 12:13AM on 1-28-2008
@JDK: I'm no expert, but from my understanding you can just copy the Time Machine directory (Backups.backupdb) on your backup drive to your time capsule and then keep on updating as usual.
Though of course, I haven't had my hands on a Time Capsule...
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Matthew Dornquast said 1:19AM on 1-28-2008
Remember, if you're not backed up off-site, you're not protected from everything. CrashPlan is a solid compliment to Time Machine's backup strategy --
http://www.crashplan.com/features/timeMachine.vtl
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DoctaJay said 12:58AM on 1-28-2008
So does this mean that I can buy a larger hard drive for my Mac (I only have a 120 GB), and with the leopard cd and my TM backup, I can upgrade my MBP?
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Michael Rose said 6:08PM on 1-28-2008
Yes, in theory, but better to buy the bigger hard drive and a USB SATA bridge ($10), then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive pre-install.
Clifford said 11:13AM on 1-28-2008
Didn't work very well for me when the hard drive failed on my MacBook. After the system was restored I was asked to log in but my original password was not recognised. I had to reset the password (to the same as before!) to log in. This seemed to break the flow of TM and I ended up recovering data from other backup sources.
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jus10 said 12:40PM on 1-28-2008
Couldn't you have just re-installed from your Leopard disk, plugged in the USB drive, copied over the files you wanted and go?
I've actually done a restore from Time Machine. Worked flawlessly. Took forever + 1 on USB, but it did eventually bring my laptop back to full working order.
Peter said 8:46AM on 1-28-2008
Some slightly critical notes, well worth a read :
http://murphymac.com/time-machine-some-details/
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