[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to restore a hard drive using Time Machine here

[wildweasel]

I just did this the other day, when I replaced my 500GB seagate drive in my macbook pro with a 256GB kingston SSD. Worked flawless, saved me so much time. Office 2011 did make me activate but that was it.

[martincooper]

I have done this as well but I still have slow performance problems with the spinning pizza wheel.
Should I restore without the system settings?
What would be lost? My passwords and such? I would rather not have to re-install everything.

[ike185]

This saved my data early this year. For some reason, i plugged in my external hard drive into my mac as i was booting up my mac, that is, I had pressed the power button on my mac and as the apple logo came on and the spinning wheel spinning, I plugged in my external hard drive.

From then on, I could no longer log into my mac, my password was no longer recognizable. I tried all I could, even resetting the administrator password but no way. Unfortunately I was also under a deadline to deliver a website which I had built on my local drive ready to take online.

So in all, thank goodness I back up once a week with Time Capsule, I don't back up everyday because of electricity shortage. So Time machine with my Time Capsule companion saved me a trip to a reseller store and also allowed me to meet the deadline. So in all, I love Time Machine as your system is restored as if nothing ever changed. The only change was my windows virtualization running on Virtual Box.

[applemanDesign]

martincooper, on 11 February 2011 - 10:45 AM, said:

I have done this as well but I still have slow performance problems with the spinning pizza wheel.
Should I restore without the system settings?
What would be lost? My passwords and such? I would rather not have to re-install everything.

not the system setting but user account.
you might try creating a new user and see if that fixes your problem.

[bastion]

A couple of caveats are in order. The lesser issue is that some licensed apps will lose track of their license information and you may need to reenter it. iWork apps are among them, and if you've got a boxed copy of iWork you never saw your license code. You'll have to fully reinstall in that case.

More of an issue: Time Machine does not back up files that are open at the time it runs. If you've got files that are almost always open, you won't have a good backup. Monolithic data stores like Microsoft's Entourage data file or MySQL or FileMaker databases are examples. If you're migrating on purpose, just make sure you shut all these things down and do one last manual invocation of TM before the move. But definitely be aware of this in case of the need to actually recover from failure.

This post has been edited by bastion: 11 February 2011 - 11:19 AM

[Maxer]

It would be great if Time Machine disks were bootable.

[Joel Smith]

I have a new iMac coming. Would it be faster to transfer my stuff from a MacBook Pro to the iMac via FireWire 800 (with the MacBook Pro in disk mode) or from its TimeCapsule backup over Gigabit EtherNet?

[NgawangKhechog]

in my experience if your disk fails and TM is the only back up you have then its great. but if you are deliberately upgrading your hard drive to a newer, bigger, better, faster one. then DONT use time machine as all the licensing problems etc are a real headache. last time i migrated to a new laptop using this method it wasnt fun having to go scrounging around for product keys etc. i also had issues with some preference settings using this method. on the otherhand i just put a new HD in my laptop that had a clone of my system on it using Carbon Copy Cloner and had no issues at all except it didnt recognize my old TM disc (maybe someone could post a fix for this) but this is not a biggy for me as i had everything and just started a new TM disk. the benefit of this is there is no down time. you can do stuff while CCC copies your disk then you just swap out the disk and its like nothing ever happened. its identical. so i keep 2 back ups. TM and a cloned disk.

[hillstones]

Joel Smith, on 11 February 2011 - 02:38 PM, said:

I have a new iMac coming. Would it be faster to transfer my stuff from a MacBook Pro to the iMac via FireWire 800 (with the MacBook Pro in disk mode) or from its TimeCapsule backup over Gigabit EtherNet?

FireWire, all the way.

[hillstones]

Maxer, on 11 February 2011 - 11:56 AM, said:

It would be great if Time Machine disks were bootable.

Kinda makes Time Machine backups rather useless, doesn't it? Why back up Mac OS X when you have to reinstall Mac OS X in order to restore from a Time Machine backup? If you are replacing your existing drive with a larger drive, it is easier to clone your drive to another, install the new drive, and then clone your data back to your new drive.

[bastion]

hillstones, on 11 February 2011 - 09:28 PM, said:

Maxer, on 11 February 2011 - 11:56 AM, said:

It would be great if Time Machine disks were bootable.

Kinda makes Time Machine backups rather useless, doesn't it?

Not in the slightest. The need to boot off of a backup is held by a very narrow demographic. Outside of extreme circumstances (beyond simply "my main drive has failed") I would even call it abusive because the act of booting off of a bootable backup both changes and endangers the data such that it's in no meaningful way a viable backup.

On the other hand, the benefit of transparent, incremental backups of one's data is quite broad.

Quote

Why back up Mac OS X when you have to reinstall Mac OS X in order to restore from a Time Machine backup?

You don't have to reinstall Mac OS X. You boot from the OS X install DVD, but then restore from your TM backup directly.

[BarryF.Keaveney]

I thought I might have to do this after a fresh re-install of Mac OSX 10.6, done because I was having problems with Mail and Safari.
In the recent past there was 'Archive and Install.' but apparently no more.
I was pleased to discover that a fresh re-install (without erasing my HD) worked fine, nothing lost....but I was certainly glad to have TM just in case.

[MaddogMadden]

Having just done this only a couple days ago, the title of the article is a little misleading. This article describes the Migration process from an old Mac's time machine backup to a brand new Mac. The process of restoring a hard drive from a time machine backup, as the article's title says, is a different process that is done via the Utilities menu during the OSX installation process.

These two different options produce VERY different results. I think oiur article's name should change to show which option you're using. The migration assistant.