Day 2: Restoring from Time Machine
Yesterday I put Time Machine to the test—can it do a full restore assuming a hard disk crash?
Ok, I didn’t actually crash my hard disk, but I decided to repartition my Mac Book Pro hard disk and reduce the space allocated for my Windows Boot Camp partition. Originally, I assumed that I would be switching back-and-forth to Windows, so I partitioned my 120GB HD with 70GB for Mac and 50GB for Windows. I found myself rarely going back to Windows. A waste of disk space, I told myself, so I decided to allocate a smaller 30GB partition to Windows.
The first thing that I did was to use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone my Leopard drive onto the external drive. I needed a backup plan in case TM does not do its job.
Next, I tested the clone by booting off the external drive. So far, so good.
I then launched Disk Utility and repartitioned my hard disk.Since I had time to spare, I decided to use CCC and restore Leopard from the external drive back to my MBP hard disk. No problems with the cloning, but after I booted back to Leopard on my MBP (I disconnected all external drives, including the TM backup drive), I found that the response time was horrifically slow. I don’t know what was causing it but I noticed that Spotlight was busy “indexing files.” The Activity Monitor was showing that CPU was running at a high 90 percent.
Anyway, at least I could boot back into Leopard using the CCC method. So I decided to try out the Time Machine method. I consulted the Help Documentation:
I did as instructed—I popped in the Leopard Install disk, clicked install, clicked Restore System From Backup from the Utilities option. I was presented with a list of dates and times which corresponded to the TM backup times. I selected the version before I began to whole CCC cloning process. After that I took a nap and when I woke up, there was a pop-up informing me that the restoration process has been completed. No entering of serial code. No selecting of keyboard or time zones. I rebooted my MBP and Leopard was up and running.
One thing though. Spotlight was still “re-indexing files.” I am not sure if that is a consequence of restoring from a backup or a consequence of increasing hard disk size.
November 04 2007 09:15 am | OS
November 24th, 2007 at 11:21 am
are you sure spotlight isn’t indexing your TM drive? it should be excluded.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 am
I think that the reason is that indexes are NOT backed up in order to save on backup space. It makes sense that your machine would then have to rebuild the indexes. Sounds like other than that, it all went well. That’s encouraging!