Restoring from Time Machine

I’d been wondering about this.  Thanks for posting about your experience.

Does transferring over to the new system also move the inevitable sludge your system builds up over time? I’m wondering if rebuilding my system from a “clean” state would be better than Time Machining over. Great post.

Thanks for the article.

It should be noted that, though I’m a fan of Superduper!, at this time it’s still not compatible with Leopard. So for now, you can remove it as an alternative to Time Machine.

Thanks for writing and investigating this.  I wasn’t aware if you could do this or not as it has not been heavily advertised or promoted.  while I prefer a pure clone backup it’s nice to know about this option as we do have one machine is our office using Time Machine right now.

You said this:
“Interestingly enough, however, is that I didn’t need to reauthorize Adobe Creative Suite. That was nice, as I’ve already used both my authorizations—one on my desktop and one on my laptop—and wasn’t looking forward to calling Adobe to ask them to reset things.”

I did not know you could authorize two machines. I want to do
the same thing, my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro.
Or did you pay extra for this?

Dan

While this is theoretically interesting, I would advise the use of SuperDuper instead of Time Machine for this.

There are three disaster scenarios:

1. “Where’d that file go?!”: Use Time Machine.

2. “My hard disk crapped out!”: Use SuperDuper.

3. “My house burned down!”: This is the tricky one. Mozy is one answer, but it doesn’t handle hundreds of gigabytes well. And I grinned to myself when I read your safe deposit box solution: This will work for about two to three months, and then the time span between switch-outs will grow longer and longer as you weary of the hassle and grow complacent. The only backup solutions that work are those that require no human intervention at all, and are completely automatic, like Time Machine and SuperDuper.

SuperDuper doesn’t work with Leopard. They are working
on it. Right now Carbon Copy Cloner does work.

Dan

Just FYI, if Creative Suite had required that you reactivate, you could have used the laptop to revoke all your activations and then reactivate. Or at least you can with CS2 (I haven’t tried with CS3 yet).

@Dan

Everyone gets two activations. That doesn’t necessarily mean you get the legal right to install it in two different places (I have no idea if it does or not), but activation system will allow it.

> Does transferring over to the new system also move
> the inevitable sludge your system builds up over time?

Mac OS X does not “build up sludge” and slow down like Windows does. However, if you are having problems with the system, then a clean install will often fix it, as it also removes any third party plugins or drivers from the system as well. A clean install is simple and painless, unlike Windows.

The method above is not a clean install. It restores your system to exactly what was on the backup.

To do a clean install, just restart with the Leopard install disks. Click the Option button. Choose Clean Install preserving user and network settings. The whole process, including updating from the internet takes about two hours. All your data, settings, and Apps will be intact. You may have to reauthorize the Adobe Suite and things like that, but generally you’re good to go.

I used Time Machine as you did when replacing a notebook hard drive. There were a couple of other small bumps along the way:

1. After formatting the new hard drive, the new hard drive was not available as a destination to Time Machine restore. I had to reboot (from the OS DVD) to make it visible.

2. Apparently, the non-essential data that is not restored includes the data used to speed up Time Machine backups. The first backup I made of the newly restored disk took forever. Apparently, Time Machine had to scan the entire disk to determine which files needed to be backed up. That seems really stupid to me.

I recently restored my system from a Time Machine backup, and thought the whole process went smoothly until it was over. When I got everything back up and running, I turned Time Machine back on under my ‘new’ system. For some reason, I thought it would recognize where I left off and do a ‘differential’ backup, but it wanted to start anew. This totally makes sense in retrospect for a number of reasons, but for some reason I thought it would just pick up where it left off.

This wouldn’t be a problem, but since my backup drive is only slightly larger than twice the size of my internal disk, the new backup wouldn’t quite fit, so I had to trash the old Time Machine info. Just thought I’d pass this along so that others are aware if they’re in the same situation.

Will: As others have noted, a rebuild using your Time Machine backup—or any other backup really—won’t fix things in the same way that a clean install will.

Markg, Dan Riley: Indeed, SuperDuper! isn’t ready. I’ve altered the text to accommodate that. Hopefully it will be ready sooner rather than later.

Mark: I agree with your first two assessments and that’s exactly how I’m doing things currently. However, I did want to test the viability of restoring a system using Time Machine and I’m glad I did. It gives me confidence having another vector for data recovery.

As to point number 3, a safe deposit box is indeed a bit much of a hassle for most people. In my case, it’s less so as my bank branch is three small blocks away—about 1200’—which makes it a quick walk. Even better, it’s on the way to a nice cafe, several restaurants, and more. Just one of the many upsides of living in downtown Portland.

For most people, the best way to rotate offsite backups is to simple swap disks with one that they store at work. It works quite well for many people I know.

I would do an offsite backup automatically via the network, but I don’t have just hundreds of gigabytes. I’ve got just around a terabyte total. The economics don’t work out. I’ll have more to share about that soon as I’ve been doing some research on this topic.

Grover: I didn’t know you could revoke all your outstanding CS* activations. That’s nice to know. It could come in handy someday knowing that.

Alan: Indeed, you do have to boot off of a install disk. I mentioned this on the last line of the 2nd paragraph of the post. As to the first Time Machine backup after restore taking forever, I didn’t notice this. But, it may have taken forever in the background and I didn’t notice.

Chris: That’s odd and interesting. I haven’t noticed that on my local system here. After several Time Machine backups since my recovery, my Time Machine disk has just about the same amount of space free as my boot disk which indicates that there’s been no doubling up of data. I wonder what happened in your case.

Not only is SuperDuper “not ready,” it will seem to run just fine on Leopard while it happily screws up your data. I can testify to this.

If you’ve read something in this thread that makes you think its worth trying, think again.

I’m confused by the “Only complete backups of Mac OS X appear in the list” sentence in one of the screen captures. Because, reading this from here, it kinda sounds like you’re supposed to somehow make a full backup before you intend to have a hard drive crash. (I suppose it’s just scary wording rather than a really stupid limitation.)

This isn’t the first time I see someone suggesting rotating two Time Machine drives, and every time I wonder if Leopard could really handle that — don’t you risk ending up with two partial backup with the OS confused about what it thinks is on the drives? Has anyone tested that?

My point was that I had to boot off the system install disk twice. The first time to format the new hard drive. The second time to make the new formatted hard drive visible to Restore From Time Machine. The second reboot should not have been necessary. The hard drive was formatted and mounted. Apparently Restore From Time Machine does not update its volume tables after initialization.

Chris: In my case, although the first Time Machine backup of the new drive took a long time, it was not copying every file, just examining every file as if the hard drive was one it had never seen before. (I checked to be sure. I have 40 backups on my Time Machine drive, half from the old notebook drive and half from the new one. There is only one copy of mach.sym with 40 links to it.)

Obviously (per references to your Dad), you understand that Time Machine is aimed at the large percentage of folks who have no backup strategy at all.  For you power users, who realize the importance of backing up your data and have previously addressed the issue using other tools, Time Machine may not meet each of your individual needs.  And that’s ok.  Apple’s stated goal has always been to provide a superior computing “experience.” I’m quite sure that preventing the average user from loosing all their data to a hard drive crash falls under that category.

Ross: Good to know. I've been holding off on SuperDuper! but know other that have been using it. Can't wait till it's out.

Garoo: I didn't mean to imply you _had_ to make a backup before you crashed out, just that I did to make sure I had everything before embarking on this mission. I'm assuming that by full, it means "completed" such that you couldn't restore from a backup that was incomplete. But I'm not sure there.

As far as rotating two Time Machine drives, it _seems_ that the only net effect is that you'd have large gaps in your history on each volume when they were disconnected. That _should_ be the only side effect. But, maybe that should be tested out.

Alan: Sorry, I misunderstood. FWIW, I didn't have to reboot between setting up my new 750GB destination volume and actually doing the restore. I did it all in one go. I wonder why you saw that behavior. And thanks for digging through on the issue of the long first backup. It's good to hear what was going on there.

Steven: Indeed, Time Machine is aimed at the general user. My aim was to validate that it did indeed work as advertised and to see how painful/painless the process was. But, in the process, I've gained enough confidence in it that I now consider it a valuable addition to my backup strategy. And, for secondary machines—such as my laptop which typically only contains transient data anyway—it may be the only strategy that's needed.

Time Machine rocks. The hard disk on my wife’s Mac mini failed beginning of December. Luckily, I had switched her to Leopard and hooked up a spare disk to Time Machine a few weeks earlier. When her disk failed, I went out and got an additional external hard drive, then used Time Machine to restore to the new external disk. Worked perfectly. Now we just need to get that internal drive fixed…

It will be interesting to see whether Time Capsule will also have this Restore ability as well.

I have had absolutely no problems using SuperDuper with either my TiBook or intel iMac both of which are running Leopard. I can boot from either back up ppc or intel to the appropriate machine and everything is an exact clone of the the drives in the machines.
I like the app because of th eafore mentioned and also because my backups don’t grow anymore than the original drives!

One thing I have noticed (and it might be because I’m using a G5 that has a kernel panic every single day somewhere between 9 am and 1PM, regardless of how long the comp has been up): searching with spotlight often doesn’t reveal existing files unless I “go back in time” and restore them, which adds a copy to the existing installation. At this point, both the original and the restored files magically appear at the same time in the current files search window. I should add that I did a clean install followed by a complete restore and that those utilities that still work with leopard (like disk utility and memtest) show no hardware errors in the system.

Very annoying. And embarrassing when I can’t find logs of technical conversations I have had recently and then, suddenly, they are there.

Sadly, “Restore System from Backup” does not always work. The setup was a Mac Mini running off its internal harddrive with an external drive attached.

When the Mini had a hardware defect, it needed to be swapped out as fast as possible. So I bought another Mini and tried a system restore from the Time Machine Backup. It all went well until about 75% into the restore at which point it would always fail - no matter which backup I chose - among the Python files of the OS - and always a different one.

A system reinstall and restoring from Time Machine via the Migration Assistant worked, but it of course left me with lots and lots of setup work including the reinstall of MySQL and the reconstruction of the database from an SQL Dump as it had turned out that Time Machine only had a very, very old backup of the actual MySQL database files.

So, I can only recommend everyone to also persue an alternative backup strategy if they want to be sure they don’t loose any data. Time Machine is great when it works - but like all other software, it doesn’t always do so..

I had an alarming few hours after a TM restore on 10.5.0 where everything seemed fine until I tried to fire up Web Sharing and couldn't get it work. The Apache2 folder was suddenly missing after the TM restore. After posting here I eventually got a manual fix, but haven't restored since 10.5.1 to see if this has been addressed.

Interesting read here :

http://murphymac.com/time-machine-some-details/

Very pretty site, and interesting article, but where is the feedback link?  There is, for example, no way to report the typo “for for less less” in this article except by posting this comment.

I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro from it’s measly 5400RPM 80GB drive to a shiny new 7200RPM 200Gb Hitachi (7K200) drive and restored via Time Machine.  It worked nicely and I experienced exactly the same things that you did.  I’d only add that Time Machine also did not seem to restore my iTunes album art nor did it restore my buddy icons in Adium.  Other than that it worked as advertised!

“Comment by Steve Didier at 2008/01/27 23:49 PST
I have had absolutely no problems using SuperDuper with either my TiBook or intel iMac both of which are running Leopard.”

That’s great for you. But the problems with superduper are well documented by the creator of the program. So please don’t give the false premise that all is well with superduper. It’s not.

There are some other files whose missing-ness can be a problem: specifically /var/spool contents.

http://use.perl.org/~rjbs/journal/35467

I did this exact procedure to upgrade my PB G4 from 80 GB to 160 GB (although I guess I could have upgraded to a 250 GB, but OfficeMax only had a 160 GB EIDE drive during their fifteen percent off everything in a grocery bag sale).

I wished I had found this article before my upgrade so I would have known about the iTunes authorization issue, which I found one morning days after when I hooked up my iPod for an update. Deauthorizing your current system should have been in the instructions from Apple, but that’s life with a potentially dead system.

On SuperDuper, I switched to Time Machine after I got several Leopard backups that refused to boot. I’ll keep it around for my pre-Leopard systems, but I’m using Time Machine for my Leopard systems.

Because of my infrequent backups (and my family’s even less frequent backups), I’m waiting with baited breath for Time Capsule. With only one desktop system (a Mac Mini G4) and a bunch of ‘books in the household, wireless backups will be the best way to keep things constantly backed up.

I actually tested this on October 28, 2007, the second I got my hands on Leopard :) I wrote about it here, and added an addendum today answering a previously asked question in this thread:

“What happens if you temporarily pause using one Time Machine backup disk, begin using a second, and then switch back to the first?  Does Time Machine “catch up” on those missed days? Well, for a sample of one, I can say ... yes.”

This might be out of the scope of your test, but if you had more than one user account on your crashed hard drive would the test easily have restored all accounts to the new drive?

Saad: Given that Time Machine works with OS X Server, I’d expect the Restore from Backup utility to be able to go out on the network and find it. We’ll see, however.

Peter N Lewis: I’m currently rebuilding the site. For now, the best way to leave feedback is just the way you did it. Thanks for the typo catch.

Peter, Roger Herbert, and Ricardo Signes: Thanks for the links. I’ll check those out and report back on what I see when I get back to home tonight.

Richard Bock: It was outside the scope of my test. I had only a single user. It’s a good question that would be interesting to hear. But, given that the entire hard drive is picked up, I’d think it’d be likely to work just fine.

Interesting.  I had an experience with Time Machine restore too when my MacBook Pro crashed frequently in iTunes and Safari after installing Security Update 2007-009 v1.1

As a result, I chose a slightly different restore method - installing Leopard first (10.5.0) - and then selectively restoring once Leopard is installed (i.e. there’s a prompt to restore files or copy from another backup, I believe it was right after the Leopard intro video).

Obviously this required a bit more work updating the system back to 10.5.1 with Security Update 2007-009 v1.1 (which curiously no longer crashed) but otherwise, the experience was exactly the same - everything worked, apart from Mail and Spotlight having to rebuild its database, and iTunes re-authorisation.  Didn’t have a problem with .Mac – (er, because I don’t use .Mac).

Had a minor problem with an iPhoto folder and had to set-up my printer again, but otherwise still a big time saver.

In the screenshot of choosing the backup to restore from: What does “Only complete backups of Mac OS X appear” mean? Would any backup that has system files be there, but none other? I do backup the system files, but just want to clarify for others.

“This might be out of the scope of your test, but if you had more than one user account on your crashed hard drive would the test easily have restored all accounts to the new drive?”

Yes, it my test all user accounts were restored.

I have used time machine a few times now to restore a system and for the most part it’s been fantastic and as a side note, you can restore a powerpc system to a Intel Architecture, I’ve tried it both ways.

I can also vouch for Time Machine working very effectively to restore a hard drive volume.  In my case, the drive could no longer read the file system not long after I upgraded to Leopard 10.5.0. 

This issue came up once before, in which case I used TechTool Deluxe to repair the file system.  This time that option was no longer open (TechTool had not yet been updated for Leopard), so I had the choice of either restoring the entire drive volume using my Tiger backup (created using RSyncX) or using the Time Machine backup that had just been created a few hours earlier.  I chose the Time Machine backup, and the whole thing went very smoothly. 

For an average user, I can’t imagine a simpler or more intuitive backup tool.  Just plug in an external USB drive, switch on Time Machine, and forget about it until you actually need it.

Did the new system continue making backup to the same Time Machine backupdb? That is, can you fly back to the days of your old disk from the new setup?

“it’s about time an operating system sported a built in back up feature”

They’re nowhere near as good as Time Machine, but both Vista and Ubuntu provide built-in backup tools.

Is something wrong with Ghost, or Carbon Copy Cloner, or driveimage .XML or any one of the other stand alone products that do this just as well.

Henri Sivonen: Indeed, I can go back to before my restore in Time Machine. I didn’t have to jump through any hoops. It just worked™. I do having missing directories in in /var/opt, which other people have commented on.

Phil Wilson: Fair enough. I’ve updated my intro paragraph accordingly.

Boomerang: Nothing is wrong with those other products. I’ve only used SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. Currently, I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner for my cloning needs in addition to Time Machine.

Interesting article. If I understand correctly, I will still require SuperDuper! (once fixed) if my drive crashes since I cannot boot from my Time Machine backup?

Jeroen: Not at all. You can boot off of any Leopard Install DVD and restore from a Time Machine backup.

Thanks Duncan. I was referring to Mark post @ 2008/01/27. Any reason why he recommends using SuperDuper?

Is 1,200 feet down the road offsite enough?

I’ve just had to go through a restore after getting a corrupted boot disk.

It’s probably worth linking to Devan Lane’s list of Time Machine exclusions: [url=http://shiftedbits.org/2007/10/31/time-machine-exclusions/]http://shiftedbits.org/2007/10/31/time-machine-exclusions/[/url]

I’ve just been bitten hard by discovering that /home is there. I’ve 15 years projects and svn repositories there of Thankfully, I still have a Backup.app weekly backup.

It looks like a lot of locally stored POP mail didn’t make a reappearance.

Before the crash, I had 3.75GB free, now I’ve 26GB!!!

Paul McGrane: I’ve actually been waiting for that question. Thanks for asking!

In my case, the 1200’ between my home office and the bank safe deposit box is probably as good as anything within 5 miles or so. The major weather risks here in Portland are fairly mild. No hurricanes and not much much in the way of tornadoes. And, even if there were, both where I live and my bank are in reinforced concrete structures. The biggest weather risk is probably flooding, but my home office is 70’ above street level, so I’m probably OK there.

As far as other risks go, every building around for many blocks is a concrete structure and is sprinklered, so major fires spreading over blocks are probably a low risk. From there, the risks get to be quite broad in scope, such as earthquakes and what not. If those were to arise, at least I’m betting on the performance of two different structures and not just one. And, to get my data far enough offsite on a frequent enough basis to protect against those kind of risks needs a much different solution.

I’ve actually been contemplating a solution to this problem that I may put into play soon. We’ll see.

SImon: Good link. I’ll propagate that up to the main article.

I had a snafu where I had to use the Migration Assistant to restore part of my data (long story).  However, when I restore my user data, I get some files which have “Restricted Access” and it won’t let me access them.  Any ideas on getting around this?

Maybe some of you will be interested about this free software.
The experimental Clonezilla 20080204-hardy or later (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115473&package_id=233347)
now supports Mac OS bare metal backup and recovery in a Intel-based Mac. It was tested successfully in a Mac mini with Leopard and Ubuntu 7.04 installed.

Warren, I had to delete an entire user account with 50 GB because of an issue with TIme Machine. Its not worked right for me since the very first day. It silently failed and when I tried to recover, I had errors. All my drives check out fine until I update to the latest and greatest version of Leopard and then Apple’s disk utility refuses to verify permissions. At which point, Time Machine won’t use the drives (brand new, pristine, as I said).

Other than then having several copies of various hard drives strewn on 3 drives totalling 1.5 TB of data, much of which I have had to copy by hand to consolidate into one working system, I must say that Time Machine is a marvelous product and I highly recommend it to all SPARC users…

Thanks for the article.  My PowerMac G4 disk went chirp, wrrrrhh, clunk, chirp, wrrrrrh, clunk in an endless loop yesterday… I knew there had to be a way to kick off a Time Machine full restore but Apple didn’t really document the process very well.  I Googled and found your posting.

I managed to buy a new HD, install it, boot up from the Leopard DVD, run Disk Utility to partition/format it.  Then ran the Restore.  For some reason it didn’t recognize the disk but opening Disk Utility and clicking the mount/unmount button to dismount and remount did the trick. 

It’s currently restoring and I am damn glad I had started using Time Machine a few months ago!  If this works, my wife will be most happy!  This will be the easiest restore from backup I’ve ever had to do that’s for sure!  A big sloppy wet thank you to Apple for this feature! 

Hopefully, I don’t run into any weird Time Machine bugs that are supposed to be fixed in 10.5.2 which is still not shipping yet.  Last developer notes stated to test Time Machine…

Great article, and reassuring TM works as expected.  I’ve linked to your article from my blog.  Hope that’s ok?

Richard

Had the same experience as Matt in the last post, but when I re booted a third time from the DVD it finally recognized the disk.

The only thing that didn’t work perfectly after the full restore was ironically, Time Machine. I wanted to just jump back in and start backing up from where I left off, and still keep my older backups as I did during the last months.

But it started a new backupdb.  and I could get the older backups.

And then I only had 16 MB left since the older backup was lying there. What to do?

While Time Machine saved my life (when the HD crashed), it did seem to have a few bumps.  Along with some of the stuff above (itunes album art, Mail, etc.), I ran across a problem after the restore that was pretty troubling.  Once I was back up and running, I set up TM again on the same external as before.  And part of the process of backing up the newly restored drive included deleting all of the previous backup data.  I don’t know why TM did this [without asking].  Though it didn’t cause me any big problems, I could see how it would for some people.  I don’t see why TM could just pickup from where it left off.

Hey!  What the hell do I have to do to get a little attention around here?

Evil

I upgraded my MacBook Pro’s internal HD this weekend and used this as a guide.

It was beautiful and all of my authorizations carried over beautifully.

Except for one Horrible glitch.

The Macintosh HD had permissions set to where I could only read!

Applications, too. In fact using the padlock>plus sign>my name>read/write set would crash finder for the Applications folder. 

I tried Apply to enclosed items at the mac HD level, and that was a horrible mistake.

I now reinstalled the OS and am currently using Migration Assistant from my old HD (the same data that was on the Last Good TM backup, which was february 7th)

Its Sunday night. There went my weekend.

sudo chown root:admin /
sudo chmod 775 /
sudo chmod +t /

fixed it like that (after another trial “i hope this works” restore from backup)

then i followed the steps here: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6179654#6179654

Do the restored Mail messages are flagged as new/unread/unreplied or are displayed correctly?

personally I use Thunderbird that has one large database per inbox -
How does Time Machine work with something like Thunderbird? each new message sent or received might change a 1 GB archive file. would Time machine make a copy of each version every hour or so?
And how does it work with a Lightroom database/ previews?

Stefano, yes. Each tiny change to the database file will cause TM to make a new backup. Apple discourage developers from using self-contained storage systems and want them to use the OS X file system natively.

Just did my first restore of the boot disk. Could only choose dates of full backups, but it restored files created after the chosen date. Strange, but that was what I wanted anyhow.

Thanks for this info! its a great help.
I wonder if anyone can answer the question; will Time Machine restore all my applications like ilife 08 and iwork 08, toast, adium...etc as well? or will i need to reinstall / reactivate them all too?

Great Blog, thanks again!

Yes Sammy, it will copy over all apps w/their settings. Caches are the only small snags, which will work themselves out anyhow.

thanks Phil!

I’ve done a quick scan but I don’t think my question has been answered yet....

Somehow, through sheer good luck, I find myself about to receive a completely new iMac from Apple as my old one (a G5) has a dead screen and they can’t source the parts to repair it. If I choose to restore my system from Time Machine when I get my new iMac, will this write over all application data on the new iMac? Can I selectively restore applications, rather than just ticking a box to restore all applications? An example: My old iMac (and hence the Time Machine backup) had iLife 06. Will this write over iLife 08?

Thanks for all the other useful info!

Great Blog.

I have a question.

I use TM to backup my iMac G5. I have 4 partitions each of which TM seems to backup (I can see the partitions as files on my TM drive).

Now my new Mac Pro (yay!) arrives today and I want to be able to use TM to restore my existing backup onto my new machine.

How will TM handle my multiple partitions when it comes to a restore on my new machine?

When I boot up from the install DVD on my new machine do I need to partition the new drive in a similar manner and naming convention as my current drive (albeit bigger partition sizes as the new HD is larger) - or will just hitting Restore automatically restore all the partitions for me?

One other thing - are there any ramifications using TM to restore from a PPC to an Intel based machine?

Any input is most welcomed - especially as the Pro is arriving TODAY! :)

*scratches head*

As mentioned by several of the above including Chris, Mike M, and Staffan, the complete restore function seems to work except that Time Machine eliminated all the old backups save the one restored from and then proceeded to write a completely new backup on the same disk (while no longer recognizing the old backup for incremental storage).  In other words you can still see the information but in effect you have to start all over again with Time Machine and all those old files you thought you were saving from two months ago are gone forever.  See discussion at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6179417 So proceed with caution on full restore use of time machine

Just FWIW, SuperDuper is now ready for use on Leopard. Great product, highly recommended.

This is probably one of the most helpful threads i've read on the subject. but i was wondering if anyone knew if a restore from a time machine backup would bring back song ratings in itunes. i use ratings to make my smart playlists and it's always something i've ran into in the past as far as recreating my library? i know it won't do album art, but maybe ratings?.....

How do I restore iCal info? I had no problem restoring iCal from Time Machine but it restored the application only- none of the data I had entered. Thanks.

This is a great guideline, Duncan!

However I am curious I somebody had the issue that an external drive which is backed up by TM has crashed?

I currently have this situation and I am wondering how I can get the data back up after I plugged in a new drive. Time Machine itself does not recognize the new drive as a replacement of the old of course so they must be a way of telling TM to restore the data to a specific new destination which is unknown to TM before.

Also I would be curious what behavious TM shows when it has restored the data to a new destination and if as described by some earlier "forgot" the previous backup data.

I am looking forward for some helpful posts!

Regards from Berlin,

Holger

I've lost my network printing ability. Network is a home network with a G5 mac pro and USB printer. I have a Mac laptop that used to print flawlessly but now won't print via the network (unless I use the smb method). I want to either restore to a date that the system worked. Or...does this sound fixable by some other means. The original post here seems to be relevant to my issues.
thanks
George

Thanks for the detailed walkthrough. I'll be upgrading my laptop as soon as the warranty runs up!

Garoo and Duncan:

Have either of you tested the "rotating backup drives" method please? I am unable to test it without purchasing an additional drive, but think this is the way I need to go.

Would be grateful for anyone to confirm it works.

Thanks,
Sue

I'm trying to restore my sistem as you James did, but it taking a long time to format the partition.

I divided my HDD in 3 partition
50Gb ext3j Macintosh HD
35Gb FAT32 Windows
65Gb ext3j Data

Could somebody tell me if it's normal or there's something wrong?

Thank you
Francesco

Thank you for this great post - its just what I needed.

I just have one additional question. I would ask if anyone know how I restore from 2 different time machines and merge them togeather in my new hard drive?

I hope somebody can help me.

I have been using my time machine as a ex-hard drive and have deleated some files from it that I now cannot recover. none of the recovery softwear I have tried will find it. any ideas?

I have just replaced 320Gb drive in my Macbook Pro 17" with 500Gb Hitachi 5K500.
Filevault is enabled in my system, so Time Machine makes my user folder backup only when I log out.

Everything went all right, except for one thing - just before replacing the disk I have made full backup. At 1am. However when I started restoring process - the last available backup was offered was 12 hours old - created at 1pm the previous day.

After restoring has been finished - it seems the backup used was actually fresh (1am). So there's a little mess. But anyway - replacement of the HD with keeping all data went almost pain free. All files, settings, even trash bin - was kept. CS3 asked for reactivation, iTunes too, desktop background disappeared - so far the only troubles I have encountered.

After doing a full restore from Time Capsule with Time Machine software (which took 6 hours), MS Word 2008 was unable to print multiple copies, no matter which printer I used. Reinstalling didn't work. Everything else multiple copies just fine, including Preview. So now I'm previewing everything out of Word 08 just to print multiple copies!

I hate Time Machine. Make an image of your disk instead.

I have a mac pro, I have used time machine to restore all 4 of my internal hard drives. Now I want to swap out my OS drive and get a bigger drive, now when I use time machine to restore from back up. Will it restore from the old OS drive or will it restore all 4 drives on my system? Or if I pick the new OS drive to be restored will it say there is not enough space because it's trying to restore all 4 drives onto the one new OS drive?

Ken

Hi

I have a quick question. I have my hard drive partitioned, one for my iMac and one for my MacBook Pro. Now i've made a whole bunch of changes on the MacBook and now I want all the document etc onto my iMac. Is there anyway of getting the iMac's time machine to restore from the MacBook's time machine?
Hmm caused me much strife....

Thanks

Pete

Can you use an old time machine backup drive, for a new Mac? I have gotten a new Mac Book Pro, and used a firewire cable to transfer everything from my old Powerboook G4 in target disk mode. Now I want to start time machine backups, but it looks like my new laptop does not recognize the old time machine hard drive, and wants to start a fresh backup. Any suggestions?

Time machine is good, but I don't like how it is difficult to find out what it is backing up. If it is backing up something which is several gigs like a VM, all you know about it is that is backing up a lot of data. It's up to you to find out.

I used to use rsnapshot on my old powebook. It lacks a graphical interface but is almost as easy to use - I made an alias so I could plug in a disk, open a terminal and type 'backup'.

One thing rsnapshot did which Time Machine doesn't is let you make a bootable backup. I imaged my main drive, duplicated it onto the backup drive and then used symbolic links (ln -s) and rsnapshot to make a bootable snaphot backup system. If anything went wrong with my main disc, which did happen once (during a client presentation, believe it or not), I could boot back into a number of snapshots from external. Literally back up and running in seconds, as if nothing had happened. Lucky I had my external backup in the car that day.

rsnapshot - free, OSS, worth checking out.

You saved my bacon. My daughter (15 months) dumped a cup of coffee in my open laptop bag which held my Macbook Pro--you can guess the rest. I had to go back to my 877 MHz G4 Powerbook (sans Time Machine), and found my backups using Time Machine were worthless. I had written off ever getting back over 20 GB of crucial data, and have been putting in 20-hour days re-writing everything for the last 3 weeks. Until now. My wife bought a new Macbook, and after reading your article, I was able to recover...EVERYTHING. Thanks for a great tool and the info on how to use it.

So a few weeks ago I found this article and decided to take the plunge and try it out.

I don't have a time capsule, but do use time machine with a drive attached to my AirPort Extreme.

The hardware upgrade went well, and I mounted my remote disk fine (after setting up the airport connection). It took a very long time to restore, which is understandable considering it was wireless. Next time I will connect via ethernet directly to the AP.

I did not have the trouble with MS Word 2008 which Jack mentioned. Not sure if that's luck or something else.

Anyway, thanks for blazing the way with this article, it was very helpful!!

Does anybody knows what will happen to your iPhone after the restore? will itunes recognize it or do you need to authorize and activate the whole thing again?

I made a backup of my Macbook to 1TB WD My Book USB external. My MacBook had crashed when it copied only 22GB (total data on disk was 115GB).
When I tried to reboot the MacBook after the crash the hard disk didn't boot up. As I have AppleCare support I sent it to Apple. They couldn't read the disk and they had to replace it.
Is there a way to restore .InProgress file? The type of file is package.

Well i have a question, i hope somebody can help me here.

I want to do a back up of my system with the time machine app.

The problem its that i need to format the hard drive, and i dont have my leopard disk with me (my macbook its a previous one before leopard).

So the question is will i be able to do the back up without having leopard as my OS using Tiger?

thanks....

I had a failure of a 160 Gig hard drive on my 17" G4 Powerbook 1.67Ghz (2 gig ram, running OS 10.5.5). I bought a Western Digital 250Gig Hard Drive to replace the bad drive. I have an ongoing back up from Time Machine. After installing the new HD I inserted the OS 10.5 DVD and asked it to RESTORE from Time Machine. The process began without a hitch.

When I left last evening I was at about 63% complete and the display said I still needed about 24 hours to complete the RESTORE process

It is now the morning of day three of the restore process.

I arrived this morning to a black screen (as expected). I touched the keyboard to awaken the machine's display as I had over the past two days ... to see the restore processes progress ... nothing happened. The light (next to the latch was burning bright. I touched "enter", I touched "return". Nothing. The display would not come to life. I waited.

After another ten minutes, still nothing after repeated attempts to awake the machine via typical means. So then I touched the "power" button for about a half second (not long enough to shut the machine down) and the display came to life. I was relieved, but only for a moment.

The display showed 67.7% restored. Only a few percentages above 12 hours ago. Very strange. I thought, "I'll check the log to see if there is any indication of why the slow process has slowed down even more.

No cursor is visible. No track pad input in noted o the screen. Crap!

Now every 5 minutes or so the display goes dark (as I would expect) but it will only wake up when touch the power button, and still no cursor or mouse visible.

Now after an hour of watching the screen, re-awakening the screen, and watching for progress ... I'm still at 67.7% restored and no indication of trackpad activity or mouse on the screen.

I have googled "Time Machine Restore Stalled". No helpful posting under that search. You site seems to be the Mecca of Time Machine discussions I can find.

Any ideas? Feel free to forward this discussion anywhere you think would be helpful.

My imac is in the process of restoring through time machine. When you mention that the mail app does not fully recover, what will happen to all of the messages I have stored under the On My Mac tab in separate folders? This is part of the reason I decided to restore my system, because after I uninstalled a program called Contactizer I tried to restore my calendar to a previous time before I installed the program with time machine. Well, after I unsuccessfully did not restore my ical file I went to my email and poof all my messages "on my mac" had vanished! As well as both my email accounts (gmail and mobileme). Then I read that the time machine copies your entire hard drive again like it did the initial time. Please help if you can. Thanks!

You started off with the "Menu" and selected "Restore System from backup". I'm curious where is this menu if the OS is now installed on the new/replacement HD? Is it off the Time Machine drive?

Thanks for the post, though - I'm thinking of upgrading the HD on my MacBook Pro to the 500Gb.

I just restored, mostly manually, from a Time Machine backup. You can actually fool Mail.app into thinking it's been run before by copying com.apple.mail.plist from your preferences folder (~/Library/Preferences) on your backup to the preferences folder on your new installation.

eSata is not off the list. I use Digitus eSata ExpressCard which does not use any drivers (at least in Leopard). I simply plugged it in way back and started using.

My TimeMachine backups go there and they show up just fine when started from DVD.
Just completed the restore last night, all is fine.

I really felt like leaving a comment:

Just received my brand new Mac Book Pro with solid state 128 Gb harddisk. I was wondering if i could restore evering my old Macbook White was in a single click.

The conclusion: YES and the proof is that I'm now writing this comment on my new MBP while listening to Moby and chatting a bit over Skype etc without a single configuration. Even all Wifi setting were transfered. No problems with syncing my iPhone or contacts.

BUT: As I'm a developer for iPhone with the SDK I had it installed in the default suggested location: /root/developer and that part is NOT backed up. For developers who depend on it for their income, let this be a warning. (However my sources were save as part of the documents directory). But i my case I could just copy the dir from the old laptop after the whole kit with all certificates etc just worked like before.

I went from a 150 Gb 'mechanical' HD to 128 Gb Solid State HD (no noise!) but while restoring I could chose not to reinstall the 'downloads' dir which I hadn't cleaned for 9 month. So that's great.

However, I can't remember I had to enter a password while restoring. If that's true: don't let anybody get his hands on your time machine....

On an old IMac G5, backed up to TC, swapped in a new hard drive, booted from a Leopard DVD, partitioned drive, then try restore from TC. Nothing happens. Installation log says:

Unable to load XIPanel_RestoreIntroduction nib file

I should add that Leopard install says it can't install on the G5 (it actually came with a MacBook FWIW), with no further explanation, though Tiger will install without problems. Running Leopard installer from Tiger gets the same failure.

Ideas?

Thanks a lot. Boot camp got screwed up somehow on my computer, and this article gave me piece of mind knowing I could restore a mac to it's former splendor through Time Machine.

Hi! OK, so.. .
I'm currently doing a Time Machine backup of 210gb.. fun. Taking a while!!

-- After it's done Im going to upgrade to 10.5.6 -- If something went wrong during this process and I couldn't get ANYTHING back, like error, error, error. (its done it before)

Would I just be able to restore from Time Machine exactly to where I was before I did the update, and be back on 10.5.5.

Thanks!

Thanks for the article, Duncan. I successfully restored from Time Machine. One thing I did differently is I restored the operating system from Leopard disks and at the end of that process, there was an option to restore data from Time Machine, which I did. It does take an awful long time to restore. But it works.

Hi All,
Thank you for all your sharing and contribution on issue. I'm new to Mac and my macbook pro did crush somehow dont know why and thank god i found this website and try the restor from time machine. my friend once told me that it actually restore all system and software. It seems the my contact data is not restored. Can anyone help me how can I restore my contact data. Thank you. Frm :Daniel

I have major bugs on my mac atm,
i reinstalled using the repair function,
all bugs remained,
now if i format and fill it with my time machine backup will they go away? (aka fresh install?)

Thanks for this information!
Restoring from a FW800 external harddrive took me about 1:20 hrs for 80 GB! So the 3 hrs for your brand new Mac OS was just a rough guess! ;-)

Cheers!

I've just started up Time Machine on a new iMac with multi accounts. I set it up from my account, but find that it doesn't run when my wife logs in on her account. When she first logged in Time Machine asked if she wanted to have the current account as the primary (or some such term) account, and said 'no' to avoid messing things up. But that messed things up and now Time Machine appears to ignore her log in. From mine it still runs for the whole HD, but that's not quite good enough, as I'm an infrequent user.
Any idea on how to change this behaviour and make TM 'go' from other accounts?

Hi James

Thanks for your really informative article. My tale of woe is that about three days Disk Utility reported an impending failure. I then attempted to backup a full disc image using super duper to an external USB drive. About half way through the copy failed, and the disc reported that it was full. Given that it was actually only half full (35 of 75 gig) I found this strange, and wondered if it was anything to do with super duper.

I then ran Disk Utility again and it reported an 'invalid file clump size'. Booted from the install disk, ran repair. At the end it reported that the disk had been successfully repaired, but here's a thing: it was still acting as if full, and would open no programmes or documents.

Guess the old restore from TM is my only option now, but I'm installing a new 500 g drive in the meantime.

Two questions: Will TM do a full system restore from a USB hard drive, and; have you heard about any other problems or issues about super duper?

With many thanks

Dick Tapsall

I found this article and just installed a new 320GB drive into my MacBook. I formatted it and selected "Restore System from Backup". I clicked on my Time Machine drive and selected the latest back up but on the next screen (the "Select a Destination" screen) all it did was sit there displaying "searching for disks". Nothing ever showed up in the list. What's the deal?

Hi, I am trying to do exactly what you have, however, when I try to select 'restore system from backup' nothing happens? Any advice would be appreciated?

My restore appeared to work, but there were at least 3 problems:

• In the finder, I was not able to drag any icons


• The spotlight icon was missing


• several programs would not launch (Any of the Adobe CS4 series)

You will be prompted for your password, enter it. Confirm the link is created (use "ls -alg /" and make sure you see a line that includes:
tmp -> /private/tmp

If so, reboot and your machine should work fine.

Maurice

Hi, Commented on your article here On my blog

Thanks this was the information i was looking for when needing to do a full restore.

Great article.

Thanks
Rob

Has anyone successfully restored a TM backup from a networked drive, not USB or FW?

I am currently using TM to backup to a ReadyNAS NV+. Instructions for that process are here.
http://www.readynas.com/?p=253

...but I haven't run a test to determine whether I can actually perform a restore, should that dreadful day arrive.

Hi, I have a 120GB Macbook and am the typical "non-techy" user Time Machine is aimed at. I've just had my 2nd hard drive crash in 12 months, this time I had a Time Machine backup.

After the service centre replaced the hard drive with Leopard installed, I attempted to restore my entire system from the Time Machine disk. When I did so, I got the message: "This volume does not have enough space to restore your system".

I'm confused about how it wouldn't fit when the old hard drive & the new one are the same size. I tried reformatting the new hd but still got the same message when i tried the restore.

Does anyone have any ideas about what to do? I am very reluctant to attempt to restore my entire system file by file or even folder by folder...

Breadfan, and I think someone else before you had the same or similar problem, as did I, that is no destination to restore to and just the message "Searching for Disks". I backed out of Restore, went back to Disk Utility, verified or repaired or both, and tried Restore again and this time the disk or volume or whatever you all call those things was there!

I am planning to buy another MacBook and would like to use TM to restore. I use Parallels and am planning to allocate a larger portion of the hard drive to Parallels than is on my current computer (50/50 now). I want it more like 85/15 on the new system. Has anyone tried this? Will the restore change the allocation if it has already been set up?
Thanks

I'm recovering from a hard drive failure. So glad I have time machine.

Question:

I would like to do a clean install of Leopard onto the new hard drive and then use the migration assistant to bring over all my data from my time machine back up.

Since the version of Leopard on my install disk is not the current version, do I need to first do all the software updates to the OS before using the migration assistant? Or can I use the migration assistant directly after the clean install and then boot into the new hard drive and do my OS updates secondarily?

when i upgraded my powerbook to a macbook pro i used time machine to backup my powerbook and restore to my macbook. every single thing even my old password from my powerbook was restored. i did this 2 months ago but then realized bootcamp assistant and printer setup assistant are both missing. i tried downloading bootcamp online but that's a beta that's been expired. been searching online to see if people have the same problems and how to resolve it...

Notice no discussion on Time Capsule - any pros and cons?

I don't have the 'restore system from backup' option in my utilities.
Is this because the disc is from 2007, and is too old?
and how do i restore without it?

I don't have the 'restore system from backup' option.
Is this because the install Mac OS X disc is from 2007, and is too old?
and how i do restore from backups without the disc?

My Time Machine restore of the system volume went normally until at a certain percentage where it stops just right there for a heck of a long time. Is there anything that I missed?

I booted from the Leopard DVD, and use the Restore from Time Machine directly.

If I am having trouble with my main hard drive and I want to format it, install clean system software and then restore from Time Machine. Can I do the restore without replacing my brand new system with the old, backed up system, since I think that is where my problems reside?

I have to say, this is one of the most confusing articles I have ever read.

I have Leopard and I cant find " Utilities > Restore System from Backup"...

Don't assume all your readers are Mac experts, otherwise we would nt be here.

I agree with you. The answer is to boot your mac from the Leopard CD. Do this by holding down the option key after you hear the boot tone. Once it shows the Install screen, there is a menu bar on top of the screen with the Restore option.

Thank you for writing this entry! I am upgrading to a mac pro from my macbook pro and have been curious about simply using Time Machine to restore onto my new system. I may still crab Carbon Copy Cloner.

Thanks again.
ace

Hello, nice article. SuperDuper! is now supporting Leopard: "System Requirements: SuperDuper v2.5 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and is fully Leopard compatible." Though, for the use of scheduling you have to pay which makes it quit inconvenient. I prefer to donate if the programme is working well.
Greets, Felix

Thanks for the great post. I currently have a partition on my MacBook aluminium, and I want to remove all volumes and just have one boot volume with my Leopard installation.

I have backed up, using Time Machine, data in all volumes and am now tempted to format my MacBook. If I do this, will I be able to restore all data from the different volumes, back onto this single volume?

Cheers,
Liam

Hi, just read with interest this post, I guess dating back to 1/08? This week I had to get my 3rd hardrive for a Mac in a year, and the first with data restored using time machine. As with your posting, I noticed similar issues, namely, email resetting and need to authorize itunes. Also, some small bits of data seem to have been lost, but nothing substantial. HOWEVER, the time machine backed up fine for a couple of days but then started to fail, giving error message "backup too large for backup volume." Yet, there remains plenty of memory space available on the external hard drive. Tests so far suggest that external drive is not failing. Am waiting to work with an Apple tech on this, and have not read extensive replies to your post, but am interested in your thoughts. Thanks, very interesting post.

Jose

Breadfan
I fixed the "searching for disks" problem by going into terminal and unmounting all volumes on that disk. in my case it was disk0
then doing an fdiks /dev/disk0
this somehow makes leopard remount the disks and send the proper stuff inside the operating system.
( must simulate like a disk being inserted )
then go back to time machine.
there must be a better way to do this.
( I remembered this from doing something else and being annoyed the disks would remount by the os )
Have fun,
Dirk

Using a WD 750GB My Book FW800 and a second unit for TM. The first drive, a data only drive lost its header info after a power failure and spike even though both my Macs (G4 dual boot and Aluminum iMac) are protected by APC Back-Ups.
When I came to work the morning after the PWR FLR, no one said anything and my ai job appeared to still be up on the screen. When I tried to continue working, everything froze. Force quitting the finder caused the header info to go on the FW which chocked the hell out of me!
I then used Disk Warrior on the G4 Dual Tiger machine to recover the jobs since the last TM backup (done weekly only) which took some time but did work from that bad drive. Then onto DVD for safety.
I then reformatted the FW data drive and used TM to restore all the other jobs (about 381GB) but because I'd reformatted with Leopard, of course my drive was no longer useful with OS9! My bad!
I am just now reformatting the drive using Tiger's Disk Utility with OS9 drivers checked on, then to the Leopard machine to restore with TM. Only two hours to go and here's hoping I am back fully save and except for the DVD (about five days stuff).
I am super impressed with DW and TM; they just saved me 5 days and 10 years work respectively!
John W

Thanks for a fantastic article, helped a lot!

Hi James,

I have a question:
What if I happen to have data on my external 1TB hard drive such as documents, movies, pictures and stuff.
but i want to use the hard drive to back up with time machine.

would the system boot on this external hard drive recognizing the bootable restore of time machine or the fact that it holds data aside the backup files would mess it up?

thanks for replies.

Time Machine requires a partition all to itself. This does not preclude you from storing your files on a separate partition. The restore process will search your portable drive for suitable Time Machine data, find the Time Machine partition, and ignore your separate partition(s) that do not contain Time Machine data.

I restored an iMac last month under Leopard from a network backup volume. This volume wasn't attached to an Airport, it was just one of the drives in a Mac Pro. I had to fiddle a bit to get this to work. After booting from the Leopard install disk and starting the Restore program from the Utilities menu, the network disk wasn't visible, so I pulled the disk out and attached it directly to the iMac (with a SATA to USB connector). To get the backup volume to show up properly in the restore program, I had to first manually mount the disk in Disk Utility and then mount the volume I needed (which is a disk image), also in Disk Utility. Then I started the restore program and everything worked fine.

I had a problem with Time Machine earlier. I lost some crucial information, so I went to the latest back-up in time machine and did a system "restore."
After Time Machine did its thing and I restarted my computer, however, my HD had about 25GB less of free space.
Any ideas how to clear up those 25GB?

After several frantic hours of apple support calls, disk repairs and reinstalls, I ran across your post. Having used Time Machine before this catastrophe solely to get back older versions of lost file and having nothing else to lose, I booted Snow Leopard from DVD and located my last Time Machine backup on an attached external drive. After 7 hours, my iMac booted up perfectly and my documents, preferences and applications were available. Time Machine works. And works well. Thanks for the heads up,

Thanks for this post! It helped me restore my system after installing a new HD in my macbook. I used the Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule, and was able to restore wirelessly after logging into my network.

Thanks again!

So the workflow is:

1. restart your machine from Mac Os DVD. Use utilities to format the HD.
2. Then reinstall the Mac OS.
3. restore your data with time machine.

Or time machine restores your data and your OS?
I want to format my hard drive because my computer is running very slow but I don't know if Time Machine will restore all my applications and my license numbers too.

Thanks!