Problems after doing full restore with Time Machine

Question

If I reinstall Leopard and and do a complete restore with time Machine, I have to erase my Time Machine backup drive and do a complete TM backup from scratch because TM will not pick up where it left off doing incremental backups. It wants to start over like it's never done any backups at all. It's a pain because it take me 4 or 5 hours to back up 270 GB. I've had to do this twice so far because once I had a problem with my startup drive and just today I made an external hard drive with leopard and restored all my files via TM.
Is there anyway to get out of starting over from scratch when I do a full restore with TM ?

Answer 1

The following procedure works for me if your restore happens to be from the last backup that Time Machine completed. (I'm not sure if it would work just as well if you restore from an older point in the Time Machine history -- but it certainly should!):
After you complete the full restore (which will force a Restart when it completes), log in and then immediately go to System Preferences / Time Machine and Turn Off Time Machine to prevent any premature additional backups.
Now go to System Preferences / Spotlight / Privacy and drag the icons for all your hard drives (including your main hard drive and the Time Machine hard drive) from the Desktop into the Privacy list. This will stop Spotlight indexing of all these drives to speed things up for what follows. You will do the indexing later (see below).
If you have any sort of automatic virus protection active, disable it at this point to speed up what follows.
Then Restart again (to get things into a fresh state), and then immediately do a Repair Permissions for your main hard drive (using Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility). Be patient. This will take 30 minutes or more and the progress bar may not advance until the very end. Do not be alarmed when several hundred notifications come up, as most of them are minor tidying up items, but some are significant. For example, you will see the ownership get adjusted for every help file in every language for every Lexar printer the system knows about (minor). You will also see the permissions adjusted for the root directory of your main hard drive (significant).
And all of these permission and ownership repairs will happen EVEN THOUGH the files you backed up into your Time Machine may have had no such problems. They are, apparently, a result of the method that Time Machine uses to rebuild your file system during the restore.
When the permission repair eventually completes, Quit Disk Utility and Shut Down the computer.
Now reset the Parameter memory (PRAM). PRAM holds copies of certain system settings for rapid access. To do this, hold down the 4 keys Apple-Option-P-R continuously and press and release the power button. When you hear the SECOND startup chime, release those 4 keys. The system will continue to boot up normally. This makes sure the system's Parameter memory is in sync with the System Preferences resulting from the restore you just completed. It probably would have been anyway, but this makes sure. Among other things, this makes sure the system takes proper note of your "computer name" (System Preferences / Sharing) which is crucial to Time Machine's ability to recognize and use your previous backup database on the Time Machine hard drive.
Now log in and fire up Mail to let it automatically finish the restore of its mailboxes by importing the necessary mail lists. Quit Mail when it finishes.
If you have any other, application specific tasks to perform to complete the restore for any other applications, now is the time to do them.
Finally, go back into System Preferences / Spotlight / Privacy, select the line showing your main hard drive in the list, and click the "-" on the bottom to remove it from the list. Repeat this for every other hard drive EXCEPT for your Time Machine hard drive. Exit System Preferences. Spotlight will now begin to re-index those hard drives from scratch. Watch this by clicking on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar. Wait for indexing to finish.
Your restore is now at the point where you can let Time Machine do a new backup.
I suggest you Restart again to get things into a fresh state (not truly necessary, but it is what I do). Then go into System Preferences / Time Machine and, at long last, Turn On Time Machine again. Then do a Back Up Now (right click on the Time Machine icon in the dock and select Back Up Now from the pop up menu).
Because of the restore, Time Machine will now do a Deep Traversal of your entire file system looking for EVERYTHING that has changed compared to the last backup on its hard drive (rather than depending on the file system transaction logs as it normally does to make incremental backups happen much faster). The "Preparing" stage for this will take a long time -- about as long as a Repair Permissions pass in Disk Utility. Eventually Time Machine will start transferring files. This will be a backup of significant size because all the permissions repairs you did above, etc., count as changes as far as Time Machine is concerned, not to mention that certain portions of the file system are rebuilt during the restore. But it should be WELL SHORT of actually doing a complete backup of everything on your system. I.e., it is just a particularly large, but nevertheless incremental, backup added on to the previous stuff on your Time Machine disk.
Crucial to this is that Time Machine recognizes the prior database on its hard drive as applying to your computer. Thus the permissions repair and PRAM resetting steps above.
When that backup eventually completes, go into System Preferences / Spotlight and remove your Time Machine drive from the Privacy list. Exit System Preferences and wait for Spotlight to finish re-indexing your Time Machine drive.
Restart once again, just to get things into a fresh state, and then re-enable any antivirus "live protection" stuff you disabled above.
You are done.
From this point on, Time Machine should do "normal" incremental backups, and the previous history of Time Machine backups should be accessible and used by Time Machine just as before.
--Bob
Message was edited by: BobP1776