dreamsINdigital Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 The hard drive in my MacBook died, and I replaced it with a new one. I'm trying to restore everything from Time Machine. First thing I did after installing the hard drive was boot from the OSX DVD and format the drive GUID and Mac OS X Journalized. I then selected to restore from Time Machine from the Utilities menu. It detected my backup, but it did not detect the new empty hard drive to allow me to restore it to (It did however, detect the other partition I have on my external drive). I thought it wouldn't let me restore directly from the Time Machine backup because the drive did not have OSX on it. So I clean installed OSX onto the drive, and now the migration assistant is restoring from my Time Machine backup. Why was it not allowing me to restore from the backup? Is this how it's supposed to be done? I suspect that this migration assistant restore isn't the same as restoring from the Time Machine backup after booting from the DVD. Would I have to reinstall OSX updates again? It's also taking an extremely long time to transfer; it estimated about 35 GB to copy and it says about 14 hours remaining. It might be because it's a first gen MacBook that only supports SATA, and I'm using a SATAII hard drive, but I don't really think that should matter. I want to cancel this and try restoring from the Time Machine backup directly if that would make it go faster, but there is no cancel button. If I manually shut it down, would it cause damage? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Helix Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 I don't believe you can restore directly from the backup in the way you are thinking, it should have seen your new drive, did you use the disk utility to format it? when you select the restore from backup during a OSX DVD boot, it reinstalls OSX clean and then imports the backup data, however this is not very good for some things, especially software that is activated and tied to your home folder. the best and easiest way to painlessly backup OSX is using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, either can create bootable EXACT clones of your entire system onto other Hard Drives Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the evn show Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 wrt the original post http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1177 Their documentation makes it seem like "if you have a drive that stopped working" then the migration assistant restoration will help you. If you've replaced the drive entirely it doesn't look like it's intended to work without an OS on the target drive. I don't have an explanation one way or the other but the documentation makes it look like this is intended behaviour. If I had to guess at a reason to require a bootable disk to restore to, it would be that the restore feature requires a bootable OS because it can't be sure that a Time Machine backup contains enough to make your system full bootable if you restore from it. How could a 10.5.0 install disk (or whatever your mac shipped with) know that a copy of time machine has everything needed to restore a bootable 10.5.10 system? The user may have stopped backing up /Library or /bsd (or some other made up directory) that later versions of the OS require. If that's the case then this is a UI issue (user should be informed why they can't just restore) rather than a bug. the best and easiest way to painlessly backup OSX is using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, either can create bootable EXACT clones of your entire system onto other Hard Drives I disagree for the following reasons: The problem with keeping duplicate copies of your entire drive is space consumption. Even a stock mac is going to ship with around 50gb of "stuff" on the drive before you add any of your own bits. Once you add in a digital photo library or music collection it's very easy to churn through 100gb or more. If you have an "average" 1GB Time Capsule that allows for 10 old copies of your drive - obviously the hourly back up trick isn't an option any more because: Backing up 100gb to Time Capsule takes more than an hour, and may god have mercy on your soul if you try to do it over WiFi. If you could back up every hour you'd have filled up the Time Capsule in less than half a day. The obvious solution: back up less often, say once a week. Unfortunately that system raises problems of it's own: Weekly backups happening say ever Friday mean that stuff you've Saturday and somehow destroyed on Wednesday are lost forever. For example: a homework assignment that you work on during the week could get corrupted if saving the file fails. Weekly backups don't allow for the fine grained browsing and recovery that Time Machine style backups allow. You're forced to start "cycling" backups much faster due to the nature of disk images. Time machine allows it to store many, much smaller backups and when it finally starts deleting ancient versions of files it can do so piece-by-piece rather than stomping on an entire image. The cycling of old backups and the course grained nature of disk images means that you're far more likely to end up with corrupt backups. For example: It's tax season - you prepare your return and store it in your documents folder. Some time later that file gets erased accidentally (ie: you though you were deleting a "draft" version rather than the real thing when cleaning out your documents folder). A few months go by without any noticeable problem - you keep backing up and cycling out old ones for newer versions. Tax time rolls around again and you realize the mistake: this tax return has $10,000 in RRSP contributions that you decided not to make. No problem restore from back-up. The problem is that your backup has dutifully archived the wrong copy of your tax return for the last 10 weeks. There is something to be said for having a full bootable restore image of your current system - it'll allow you to recover from a disaster in record time: "dd if=/dev/disk0s1 of=/dev/disk0s2" and 30 minutes later you're up and running. If you forgo using disk images you could backup to separate drives, or a single one containing several partitions -- in that case you end up being able to just run fro the USB drive and be up and running in seconds. That system doesn't address the same set of issues that Time Capsule/Time Machine does: On, automatic, and completely background. Once you turn it on you can forget about it. No plugin in disks, deleting old backups, etc. Regular: by default it's every hour so on average you shouldn't lose more than 30 minutes worth of effort in a severe data loss event. Incremental. You have access to every version of every backed up file not just the last couple of working versions. Easy to restore from. Trying to merge restore information from Backup N and N-3 is difficult when swapping media but trivial when using time machine. They serve different needs and there's no reason you can't use both, but full disk duplicates are not a substitute. With respect to the average home user: they can afford a couple of hours of downtime in the unlikely event of a disk crash so IMO incremental backups like those Time Machine provides are the preferred first choice. For a business system (ie: photographer shooting tethered with a macbook) down time might not be an option so a mirrored drive is probably preferable. Important user files are likely to be stored on a server somewhere anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamsINdigital Posted August 4, 2009 Author Share Posted August 4, 2009 (edited) This is exactly what my situation is here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1501778 From what those people say, it sounds like you can restore the Time Machine backup on a brand new hard drive without OSX on it. When I tried it, it detected my backup, but when it asked me where I wanted to restore it to and gave me a list of choices, it didn't detect my brand new hard drive. I'm thinking it might have just needed more time for it to be detected. In the list, it detected my spare partition on my external hard drive, but it was taking awhile to calculate the space. I didn't wait to see if my new hard drive would show up on the list after it finished calculating the space for my external drive; I just quit out of that and proceeded to install a fresh copy of OSX and used the migration assistant. The migration assistant is down to 8 hours from 14. I'd only be ****ed if the full restore from Time Machine directly via the DVD is a lot faster than this, partially because I'm worried that these nonstop hours of constant HD activity is stressing my drives, especially the external one. Edited August 4, 2009 by dreamsINdigital Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dyn Posted August 5, 2009 Share Posted August 5, 2009 Make sure the drive is formatted as extended HFS with journaling. The Time Machine restore utility only looks for formatted HFS drives in the machine as does the setup utility. If you only want to partially restore some stuff (just settings and software, not the user's files) it's better to use the migration assistant in combination with your Time Machine backup. Calculating the backup size and the free space on the destination drive can take quite a while so just sit back, have some coffee. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Helix Posted August 7, 2009 Share Posted August 7, 2009 I disagree for the following reasons:The problem with keeping duplicate copies of your entire drive is space consumption. Even a stock mac is going to ship with around 50gb of "stuff" on the drive before you add any of your own bits. Once you add in a digital photo library or music collection it's very easy to churn through 100gb or more. carbon copy cloner can update previous backups to current, you do not need to have any more space than than the amount you are backing up. and you can restore it to a new drive as if nothing happened it is the same as having your system OS on a Raid 1 set except it is not realtime, i do this and update the backup twice a month on a 640gb system drive to a 1tb external Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thefarewellnote Posted August 7, 2009 Share Posted August 7, 2009 The problem with keeping duplicate copies of your entire drive is space consumption. Even a stock mac is going to ship with around 50gb of "stuff" on the drive before you add any of your own bits. Once you add in a digital photo library or music collection it's very easy to churn through 100gb or more. A stock install of Leopard will come out to be about 8 GBs - add the iLife Suite (which of course comes with all new macs) and you are looking at around a total of 14 Gbs. A little under the 50 Gbs ;) And if you don't install the print drivers and the few extras that do come with Leopard you can shrink around 2-3 GBs out of that. and get it all around 11 GBs total. Throw in the iWork suite and you are looking at another 1 GB of space. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the evn show Posted August 7, 2009 Share Posted August 7, 2009 carbon copy cloner can update previous backups to current, you do not need to have any more space than than the amount you are backing up. You do if you plan to cover accidental deletion or systemic corruption. IE: saving a photoshop file fails today and corrupts the file. You do your "update previous backup" tonight. Tomorrow when you realize the file is corrupt you have no way to recover it. There is value in being able to revert to prior states that you lose by simply creating an exact copy of your drive regularly (and not keeping older versions). it is the same as having your system OS on a Raid 1 set except it is not realtime, As I'm sure you're aware: RAID is not a backup. Your proposed system is better than than raid 1 in some respects (ie: deleting an important file doesn't instantly destroy your redundant copy as well) but it is not as robust as the incremental backup system that tools like time capsule provide and doesn't provide the downtime protection that RAID would provide. i do this and update the backup twice a month on a 640gb system drive to a 1tb external I'm glad you find this solution effective. IMO it doesn't offer as robust protection as an incremental backup strategy that preserves earlier versions of data. Your proposed system will happily propagate corrupt data and accidental deletion to your backups without a way to recover. Under your system: if you don't notice corruption or accidental data loss in an average of 7 days then your data is lost. A stock install of Leopard will come out to be about 8 GBs - add the iLife Suite (which of course comes with all new macs) and you are looking at around a total of 14 Gbs. A little under the 50 Gbs Fine, let's run with 14gb (the amount listed in the system requirements for the mac boxed set). Nothing really changes: Hourly backups by creating cloned images of your drive to a 1TB drive (950gb of usable space on a 1gb Time Capsule). That's 67 backups. or about 2 days worth of history (not that anything changed). If you change a single 4 kilobyte file every hour - your method of cloning drives gives you roughly 2 and a half days of history. A 1 terabyte drive using time machine would be able to restore you computer to any state it exists in for the next 27,800 years. Assuming you've got some sort of script rigged up to backup automatically and that no user intervention is required there are still two significant down sides to your approach. You have an average of 1 week worth of un-archived data at any time compared to 30 minutes for Time Machine. You have a single previous version of data to restore to - compared to dozens or even hundreds for time machine (depending on your usage patterns). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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