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My Experience With Time Machine
Posted at May 28, 2008 3:56 pm | In Software | By Ben Woodruff
Tags: Apple/Mac, Research, Software, Technology
Last night I ended up having to do a full restore of my MacBook Pro using Time Machine. I was trying to uninstall libusb, SANE, and some other utilities that do not have proper uninstallers. I wrote a shell script that got a list of all the files added by the installer (using the lsbom command line utility) and deleted them. Unfortunately it somehow also deleted my entire /Applications folder, and who knows what else. My bad.
Luckily for me, Time Machine had just finished a backup before I started. I didn’t have much confidence / hope that it would do a good job of doing the restore, but it did much better than I expected.
I booted from the OS X Leopard install DVD and chose Restore System from Time Machine Backup from the Utilities menu. It found my My Book hard drive that is attached to my AirPort Extreme (and has my Time Machine backup on it). Logging into the drive and starting the restore was very easy and straight forward.
The restore took about 3 - 4 hours (over 100Mb ethernet). Everything looked good when I started the laptop. I logged in as usual and everything seemed to be OK. I only ran into a couple of issues.
- Spanning Sync
I use Spanning Sync to sync my iCal with Google Calendar. When I opened iCal I noticed that Spanning Sync had created duplicates of a bunch of events from my work calendar. I ended up recreating the calendar, using information that was still on Google Calendar.
One cool thing that came out of this was that I found out that there is a new beta version of Spanning Sync that also allows syncing of Address Book to Gmail. I primarily use this as yet another backup. I figure if there is a fire or something of that nature, a lot of my data will still be stored online. - Apple Mail
Apparently Time Machine does backup email messages, but they have to be imported after doing the restore. This scared me, because I thought I lost all of my mail, but the process was quick and painless. Mail automatically detected the messages and imported all of them (thousands) in a matter of minutes. Some of my messages in my Gmail “All Mail” folder got corrupted (the sender was stripped out and the date recieved was changed to today). I rebuilt the mailbox (Mailbox -> Rebuild, in Mail) and it seems to have fixed the problem. This was probably the least painful of the problems, as even if the rebuild had not been successful, I use Gmail / Google Apps for almost all of my mail (98%) and all of that is stored at Google as well. - 1Password
Unfortunatly I still seem to be having a problem with this. In Firefox, when I try to restore a form, I get a decryption error. I’ve tried repairing the keychain, recreating it (by exporting to a 1Password Interchange file, deleting the keychain, and importing the Interchange file), etc, with no luck. Hmm. Frustrating as I use 1Password to remember all of my passwords. This isn’t 1Password’s fault: it’s Apple’s keychain’s fault. This will be fixed in future versions of 1Password, but I need to get it working now. Something I just need to spend some more time on. If it comes down to it I can either print out all of the passwords and manually recreate the keychain or copy and paste from the online my1Password service (yet another place my information gets backed up off-site). - Missing data
This was my fault, not Time Machine’s, but I had told Time Machine not to backup my Media folder, my Downloads folder, etc. My rationale at the time was that they are generally very big folders and would take a very long time to backup. Stupid mistake. What is the point in having a backup if it doesn’t get you back up and running where you want to be? Luckily I had a SuperDuper! backup from Sunday night that had these folders in it, so I didn’t lose very much. I’ve since corrected this so now Time Machine backs up everything on my hard drive.
Overall I was very impressed with Time Machine and will continue to use it, in conjunction with SuperDuper!. Now I just need to get my 1Password.keychain fixed up.
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