I just upgraded the hard disk in a Mac Mini. Before performing surgery on the Mini, I used Time Machine to back up the entire disk to an external disk.
When the back-up was complete, I installed the new disk and booted the Mini from the installation DVD. I tried these instructions
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html
and the restore failed. I assume this was because the backed-up version of OS X had all the updates (including, I suppose, to Time Machine) and the OS X installer is an earlier version. It was growing late and I wasn't interested in investigating software bugs.
I restarted the Mini and ran the installer again. This time I did not select the Restore option from the menu. I advanced the installer and there was an option on another menu to restore user data from Time Machine. I selected it and advanced the installation. Then I went to bed. In the morning, all user data was indeed restored, but OS X needed to install the latest OS updates. Yet the OS had all the latest updates before I ran Time Machine the first time.
Questions:
a) Is my conjecture about the first failure of the Restore correct?
b) Doesn't Time Machine back up the OS too?
c) If (b=true), did the Installer overwrite the restored OS files?
I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my ability:
a) No, I think that should have worked, and it sounds like it ultimately did, but will require running software updates afterwards because,
b) No, Time Machine only backs up a select set of folders by default, and doesn't, for example, back up the cache files, etc. so,
c) No, it didn't overwrite them, it re-wrote some of them them from the Install disk.
I love Time Machine for what it does, but it does not entirely replace a long-term back-up and archive function. If you want to save some time and space on your TM disk, you might want to exclude a few items manually from your TM backup. If you exclude the main System Folder, TM will ask if you also want to exclude UNIX system tools and utilities as well, and if you choose to do so, these files will have to be recreated from the Install disk while you restore the TM backup, but that's easily done and saves a lot of initial setup time and backup activity. If you use the Entourage mail program, you may want to exclude the mail database, as it gets backed up every time it changes and is, or can be, quite a huge file that undergoes very small changes every time you get/send mail.
Happy Mac'ing!
Dan
Thanks, Mr M. I'm impressed by Time Machine -- no other OS has such an easy solution built-in. On Linux and BSD, I resort to Perl and rsync. (o:
I thought the entire drive had been backed up because the original partition used 50/60 GB and the back-up size was 50 GB. In any case, all userland data was saved. The need to download all OS updates again was just inconvenient.