Result – Full system restore with Time Machine/ReadyNAS NV+

dodfaefife

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my 24" 2.8ghz iMac went down with a bad hard drive on Friday afternoon – ouch!

I use TM to back up to a 3Tb ReadyNAS NV+ which sits on my home network. So, after swapping in a new drive (thank you next day guaranteed from Amazon £53) and some Terminal advice from the guys at readynas.com's mac forums I left it running a 'full system restore from TM' and went to bed. Got up this morning to my mac just as I had it on thursday, every app, website login, network pref and folder. Most I had to do was OK the mailbox rebuild and re-authorise my iTunes purchases

Nice to know that should the worst happen you can trust your TM backups to do the biz.:smashin:
 
And there is the benefit of ensuring you take backups regularly.
I don't use Time Machine, but SuperDuper which makes an exact copy of my OS X drive that I can boot from. So if my main hd was to die I know my external drive can be powered up and the iMac can run from it (all be it a bit slower being that it's firewire 800).

Simple case of replacing the internal drive and then getting SuperDuper to copy my OS X external install onto the new drive (takes about 40 minutes) and away I go. Nothing else to do after that :smashin:
 
Is there a case for using Super Duper alongside TM? The SDuper website seems to think so. Why would you need to do that?
 
I too, was fairly happy with my TM restore, although my copy of Contribute 3 needed reinstalling
 
Is there a case for using Super Duper alongside TM? The SDuper website seems to think so. Why would you need to do that?

Never used TM as SuperDuper just does the job for me. I don't need to go back to multiple copies of a file. No idea why you'd want to use both, but going by your restore and that of Fizzoid and having to do stuff after the restore to get back to normal maybe SD would be a better restore solution than TM. It is a complete mirror image of your current install so doesn't need anything other than copied to a new drive when the need arises.
 
It's all a question of how many sets of belts and braces you want.

When I had to look after the Mac server at work I had it set up with two identical HDs one mirrored the other with TM which was perfect if someone lost/overwrote a file I could pull it back before they were finished giving me their excuse for losing it (I could do it without leaving my desk via sharescreen). In addition the server was backed up to a AIT tapes with daily, weekly, monthly rotation of tapes kept off-site.

And that's the key – all the backups in the world are useless if they're kept next to the thing they're backing up. A quick fire, flood or theft and you might as well not have bothered. Buy a cheap HD/Flash stick and do an extra backup to it once a month (or how often you want) and stick it in a drawer at work/a mates/your mums house.:)
 
I had a hd failure on my macbook. im more than pleased that i was using TC with external drive. Made for a very painless reinstallation.

I strongly suggest that everyone with a mac uses TM with either an external drive or the time capsule.
 
Re the mailbox - I read that when restoring the HD with TM it doesn't restore your mail but instead thinks it's launching Mail for the first time and rebuilds the mail database. Am I right to assume that the mail messages are in fact all on the TM backup and it simply has to rebuild them from there?
 
Re the mailbox - I read that when restoring the HD with TM it doesn't restore your mail but instead thinks it's launching Mail for the first time and rebuilds the mail database. Am I right to assume that the mail messages are in fact all on the TM backup and it simply has to rebuild them from there?
I think that you have read wrong. Time Machine doesn't know or care that particular files are mail messages it just restores your disk back to the state that it was in when the TM snapshot was taken.
 
Never used TM as SuperDuper just does the job for me. I don't need to go back to multiple copies of a file. No idea why you'd want to use both, but going by your restore and that of Fizzoid and having to do stuff after the restore to get back to normal maybe SD would be a better restore solution than TM. It is a complete mirror image of your current install so doesn't need anything other than copied to a new drive when the need arises.
I doubt that you are doing a Super Duper backup every hour which is the frequency of Time Machine operations. So with TM the worst case is that you lost what changed in the past hour.

You may think that you don't need to go back to multiple copies of a file but we can all imagine circumstances in which that functionality would be useful. Accidentally deleting a file, mucking up the editing of a file. It's easy enough to do & being able to turn back the clock for just an individual file by an hour, two hours, 12 hours or whatever is a great facility.

There is nothing to stop you using a belt & braces approach & using SD in addition to TM. It is quicker to restore a Super Duper backup.
 
I doubt that you are doing a Super Duper backup every hour which is the frequency of Time Machine operations. So with TM the worst case is that you lost what changed in the past hour.

You may think that you don't need to go back to multiple copies of a file but we can all imagine circumstances in which that functionality would be useful. Accidentally deleting a file, mucking up the editing of a file. It's easy enough to do & being able to turn back the clock for just an individual file by an hour, two hours, 12 hours or whatever is a great facility.

There is nothing to stop you using a belt & braces approach & using SD in addition to TM. It is quicker to restore a Super Duper backup.

Just don't see the point when 99.9% of my iMac use is browsing the internet :D
There is nothing I have that I'd loss sleep over if I lost it so my weekly SD backup is more than enough for me. Anyway, I'd hate to have my external drive on all the time doing backups every hour as it ain't the quietest :smashin:
 
I think that you have read wrong. Time Machine doesn't know or care that particular files are mail messages it just restores your disk back to the state that it was in when the TM snapshot was taken.

It's just that dodfaefife says in the first post that the mailbox had to rebuild, and then on another site I read a similar thing. So what does rebuild mean? Does it mean that it simply rebuilds the email messages into Mail as it has actually stored them OR does it mean that my emails will be lost and dodfaefife has in fact rebuilt them from another source????
 
It's just that dodfaefife says in the first post that the mailbox had to rebuild, and then on another site I read a similar thing. So what does rebuild mean? Does it mean that it simply rebuilds the email messages into Mail as it has actually stored them OR does it mean that my emails will be lost and dodfaefife has in fact rebuilt them from another source????
Hi again. What happened was I got the welcome screen when I booted mail back up, I thought I was going to have to re-impute my account settings but once I hit OK it simply reconnected to my mail servers and pulled back my mail into the relevant accounts (I've got two email addresses plus two from my previous ISP that are still active while I switch over).

So, no, I didn't have to manually do any rebuilding and I didn't loose anything. I'm assuming that would also be the case if my mail had been set to download locally when the iMac broke as they would still have been backed up by TM. Hope that helps.
 
when you say all your apps were in place, does that include payed apps like word and photoshop? am wantin a new mac but cannot afford it if i have to replace all my software too.
 
And there is the benefit of ensuring you take backups regularly.
I don't use Time Machine, but SuperDuper which makes an exact copy of my OS X drive that I can boot from. So if my main hd was to die I know my external drive can be powered up and the iMac can run from it (all be it a bit slower being that it's firewire 800).

Simple case of replacing the internal drive and then getting SuperDuper to copy my OS X external install onto the new drive (takes about 40 minutes) and away I go. Nothing else to do after that :smashin:

This is exactly what I do.
 

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