TimeMachine FTW!

Not withstanding the fact that I needed to restore my operating system in the first place – due to an inexplicable and catastrophic failure of the Java installation resulting in segfaults – I was able to restore my entire 100GB system in around 4 hours. For posterity:

• Boot off the OS X System Install DVD – hold down option while the system starts
• Connect the external drive with the TimeMachine backup – in my case a TimeCapsule attached via ethernet
• Select “Restore from TimeMachine backup” in the Utilities menu
• Select the specific backup (by timestamp) from which to restore
• And away you go!

The disk is then automatically erased and a fully bootable system is restored sans temp directories and cache files. It even managed to restore my PostgreSQL databases that were running at the time – which probably says more about PostgreSQL than anything.

The one grumble I do have is that the timestamps in the name of the backups were some non-obvious period relative to the actual date the backup was made. The difference wouldn’t have been much of an issue had I simply needed to restore the most recent backup but as it turned out I needed to go back a couple of days in order to get a clean system. Thankfully I got lucky on the second attempt :)

Once I had restored the system I took a look at the backup folders and sure enough there are two timestamps: the one in the folder name, and the created date. The created timestamp was spot on but the one in the folder name – the one presented to you when restoring – was whacky. I honestly didn’t spend long enough to calculate if the difference was consistent.

What is really interesting is that I had SuperDuper! on my list of software to start using but it would appear there is little need – at least in my case.