Apple Does Backup and Restore Right
I had the misfortune to suffer a hard-drive failure on the iMac I use as my primary work machine last week. It had to be brought up to Denver to get fixed at the apple store. Apparently they had to have a new hard-drive shipped in, I guess that’s not something they keep spares of lying around in their service department. Go figure. So, I have had a nice 500gig external drive with a partition for Time Machine backups since I’ve been using this work computer. I complained about Time Machine sometimes because it would freeze up Finder operations, especially while using Photoshop. I would usually have to pull the power plug out of this external firewire drive while the activity light was flashing in order to get the system to do anything again. So I wasn’t the happiest with Time Machine in general and sometimes had big gaps of a week with no backups on the drive. Luckily I had let it run for a couple days right before the massive harddrive failure put me out of business. (I worked at home while it was getting repaired)
My experience with getting my work computer back up and running after coming back from the Apple Store was actually very painless. It was a clean install or Leopard with no patches, it brought me through the welcome movie when I turned it on for the first time, the second setup screen asked me if I wanted to restore from a Time-Machine backup. Of course I want to! I then select all four options of what data to restore (Applications, User Files, Networking, and the Drive Root) because there’s plenty of room on this new clean hard-drive. 40 minutes later my computer is back! All of my settings and programs just like I left them. My last Firefox session was even restored! The one exception is of course Entourage, because if you don’t exclude your Entourage database file from the backups it takes up many gigabytes of extra space with incremental backups from every day. Luckily all my email, etc is on the company exchange server. So, I put in the right config info and everything was back. Apple did the right thing by making Time Machine work so easily and brainlessly, and making restoration a breeze. This system is a lifesaver.