Although few people do it, restoring from backup is the only way to ensure that your backup and recovery system works. Since upgrading to Leopard, I have been using Time Machine to back up my laptop over the network (onto a and external hard drive connected via USB to my Airport Extreme). What better way to test a restore from Time Machine than to put in a bigger hard drive and restore? I figured if it didn’t work, I would still have my old hard drive (still working but too small).
I am happy to report that the restore went perfectly. The general instructions are to be found here. The only difference is that I restored from the network rather than directly through the USB port. The one little hitch I ran into was that it took a couple of times for the utility to see my new local hard drive.
I am the kind of person who is frequently shocked when things work as advertised so I was in awe that, after I swapped out the hard drive and ran through the process, it was like nothing happened but the free space of my hard drive grew. All the software was as I left it. Even my BASH history was intact. The only thing missing was my “Downloads” – I had to recreate it. I guess this is because Mac regards this as a temporary space and not worth recovering.
So, don’t hesitate to set up Time Machine. It could help you recover from a massive hard drive failure, a stolen laptop, or any other disaster – as if it never happened.
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One more thing that was missed by the Time Machine restore. My “Movies” folder. Oops. Thank goodness my Music folder (that holds my iTunes music) came through.
Doh! The reason why Time Machine didn’t back up Downloads and Movies was because I told it not to so I could save on disk space. Silly me!
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but does this restore the last version of your computer onto your new hard drive or does it take the entire contents of your external drive (time machine drive) and put it on your new internal hard drive. I want to get a bigger hard drive in my mac and transfer every single file i ever saved on time machine. Does this exist?
thanks…
This process just restores the latest copy of you hard drive. After you did you restore, I guess you could navigate through Time Machine and restore things that you deleted.