Time machine restore help

I've recently been having issues with my early 2008 black Macbook. I ran the apple HW diagnostics and determined it is a bad hard drive. I went out and bought a new 500GB SATA HD, and attempted to restore my system using a Time Machine backup. I booted into the Leopard Disc that came with my computer, formatted the drive, and ran the Time machine restore. Everything appeared to go fine (took about 2 hours, no error messages). However, after the machine rebooted and attempted to boot into OSX an error similar to this popped up. http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/7792/pict0017lo8.jpg
Any thoughts as to why this is happening? I don't really want to start over with a clean install, that's why I have Time Machine!
Other information:
My computer originally had Leopard, and was upgraded to Snow Leopard.
I have boot camp setup on my mac for Win 7. (I know this isn't backed up or restored as part of a time machine backup, which I'm O.K. with.)
Thanks in advance for all your help.

Any number of possibilities. First, did you prep the drive properly:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Any brand new drive should be setup per the above because they usually are configured for use on PCs rather than Macs.
Second, depends on how you went about the process of restoring your system. Select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "time machine." Look for an article specifically about performing a full system restore. Also, see User Tips for Time Machine for help with TM problems. Also you can select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "time machine" to locate articles on how to use TM. See also Mac 101- Time Machine.
What you saw was a kernel panic screen. Panics at startup may be indicative of a hardware problem. You might give this a try:
How to run hardware diagnostics for an Intel Mac
Boot from your original OS X Installer Disc One that came with your computer. After the chime press and hold down the "D" key until the diagnostic screen appears. Run the extended tests for a minimum of two or three hours. If any error messages appear note them down as you will need to report them to the service tech when you take the computer in for repair.
Some "common" error indicators:
SNS - sensor error
MEM - memory error
HDD - hard disk drive error
MOT - fan error
To assure the problem isn't with your backup you might consider installing OS X by itself. If all is OK, then you can complete the TM restore using Migration Assistant.

Similar Messages

ALL Photos missing after Time Machine restore (help)

So, I accidently formated the wrong drive while in Windows, (big oops) which gave me the opportunity to take Time Machine for a test drive.
I put the DVD in, and was able to restore from the TIme Machine drive. Very impressed! Everything came back just as I had left it except - whats this? The default Leopard wallpaper instead of a picture of my son? Huh strange, I thought. Until I noticed I had no photos in iPhoto.
There seems to be reminents of photos in the iphoto database - the size is 1.3gb instead of the 7gb it used to be. But 0 photos in iPhoto 08.
I went into iPhoto and choose File/Browse Backups. I selected Nov 8th, which was the last day of my backup and showed all 7000+ photos, and clicked "Restore All". This brought up something odd - a 2nd iPhoto icon in the dock, which showed a progress bar for the restore. Once the restore was completed, I still had a 2nd iPhoto icon the the bar, which was iPhoto running - but no photos in iphoto! I exited the 2nd iphoto, which disappeared, and launched my normal Iphoto icon. Still no photos! (That just seems odd that it would launch iPhoto with a 2nd icon)
So, I moved my iphoto database, and launch iPhoto in order to create a fresh database - thinking maybe that was the issue. I then did File/Restore again, and went through the whole processes again, including the odd 2nd icon. Still, no photos! And another 1.3gb iphoto database!
Is it normal for a Time Machine restore to not include your photos? Surely you are not supposed to restore them separately from within Iphoto?
What do I do now? At this point, everything went very well - except no photos! Which is awful and not at all expected! 7000+ family photos! At least, if I ask iPhoto/Time Machine to restore 'all photos' you would think it would restore 'all photos' - not show a progress bar, and then show me no photos!
p.s. I just tooked at the iPhoto Library. The 1.3gb is in /Data/ which contains folders 2000-2007, my Events, and thumbnails of all the photos - but no actual photos (the 'Originals' folder is missing).
I then went back in time, and found the 8gb iPhoto Library database. I supposed I could copy it over manually via Time Machine, and not iPhoto's Restore/TM - but - i'm so far off track of how this should have went I don't know what to think!
p.s.s. So I did just that - copied the 8gb iPhoto Library manually from TM, and pasted it in place. I help down option, and launch iPhoto, selecting the 8gb library - and BOOM... no photos!
Something is #$%# up here.
Message was edited by: metzen79

This is what it says in the help file:
Reverting to a previous Mac OS X version
If you’ve used Time Machine to back up your computer, you can easily revert to a previous version of Mac OS X if you’re experiencing trouble after installing an update.
IMPORTANT: Reverting to the previous version of Mac OS X will erase any additions or changes you’ve made to the files on your computer after installing the new version of Mac OS X. To save new or revised files, copy them onto a different disk or back them up using Time Machine before you follow these instructions. Use Time Machine only if you’re reverting to a previous version of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), since Time Machine is not available with Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier.
To revert to a previous version of Mac OS X:
Insert the disc you used to install the new version of Mac OS X, and double-click the Install Mac OS X icon.
In the Installer, choose Utilities > Restore System From Backup.
In the Restore Your System dialog, click Continue.
Select your Time Machine backup volume.
Select the Time Machine backup you want to restore. To restore your computer to the state it was in before you installed a new version of Mac OS X, choose the most recent backup.
Follow the onscreen instructions.
If you backed up any individual files as described under the Important message above, you can restore them now. If you backed them up using Time Machine, recover them using the Time Machine application. (You’ll find the Time Machine application in the Dock or in the Applications folder.)
Hope this helps
Denisimo

Time Machine Restore Help Needed

Hello All,
I replaced my hard drive and restored from Time Machine.
I have a MacBook Pro that just missed the age barrier for Mountain Lion, so I have the latest Lion - 10.7.4.
Now that my laptop is more or less back in shape, I cannot play music in iTunes, the message says can't find originals. I have tried restoring the Music file again, but to no avail.
As well, my Mail is messed up. It has been running for 2 hours now with the message "Importing Mailbox . . ."
Alas, iPhoto cannot locate my pictures.
I need help. When I backed up to Time Machine before all this happened, everything had backed up and was working. I clicked ctrl R to begin the back up.
HELP - I am not sure what to do. I havn't had the heart to check my videos!! As well, my budget spreadsheet in excel was an original document when it was backed up, not it is an 'alias' and I am getting the message that the original cannot be found.
Thanks to all who can offer some guidance - this is way to stressful.
Clint

Well, iPhoto and Mail are back to normal. But for the life of me, the following are still giving grief - ANY SUGGESTIONS would be welcome:
I cannot play music in iTunes, the message says can't find originals
my budget spreadsheet in excel was an original document when it was backed up, not it is an 'alias' and I am getting the message that the original cannot be found.
Clint

I need time machine restore help

Can someone please tell me what the screen should look like when I do a complete restore onto a new hard drive? The blue candy cane bar is spinning. There is no percent complete or hours until completion showing. It ran all night. 500G hard drive. I think it could possibly take 20 hours but I don't want to let it run if it is virtually locke

First I would like to say thank you for replying to my question. After 24 hours of the blue candy cane bar just spinning and spinning I decided to open the disk utility option that was being offered. I noticed that the same number of files and gigs were still on the hard drive. I figure it was NOT doing anything. So I opted for a restart and held command R again and tried it with a slightly older time machine file. This time it started right up and now I see the progress bar. It has 7 hours left to go. Hoping this will actually work. It will save me so many hours trying to drag files from my old hard drive. BUT I am going to mark that you answered my question just because you replied and I am certain that if I had not discovered this on my own you would have known the answer. So thanks for the help. (editing so that hopefully it will let me click the correct support acknowledgement)

Update from 10.7.2 to 10.7.3 blown - Time Machine Restore blown

Hello,
summary of events:
Update form 10.7.02 to 10.7.3 went wrong
After Time Machine Restore no more Recovery Partion
Lost about what to do
On Saturday, I startet to update 10.7.2 to 10.7.3 on my MB Pro 15" (2007) Apples Software Update showed the combo update, and so I started download and installation. Just before that, I had run Time Machine on an external USB drive, so I was relaxed.
After about 2 hours, the update was still running with no progress. After another hour, I forced a restart. Not very suprisingly, after the login, the wheel beneath the Apple logo kept on running.
So I restarted from the Recovery Partition, selected my Time Machine-Backup from the external USB drive, selected my internal HD as target and clicked on "go".
While the progress bar showed progress, I waited. Then it seemed to be complete and the MBP restarted. Now I got a folder with a question mark. My heart rate did not yet accelerate, since I had a back up, right?
So I restarted again trying to boot from Recovery Partition - BUT, there was no longer a Recovery Partition. Or at least, nothing I could boot from.
What options do I have? I could get my hands on a DVD that contains an Lion installation from the app store, but that is not the most recent version, as far as I can tell. If I would go that way:
Does the version of the Lion-app matter?
Will it create a Recovery Partition?
If not, how else could I restore a complete Time-Machine backup?
Any help and suggestions are very welcome :-)
Regards
Jimbo
Naturally, I a am mad as **** at Apple. First, that they abandoned physical media for Mac OS distribution, and secondly that some not so bright lad thought it not necessary to secure the availability of the Recovery Partition under any circumstances short of phyical damage. This really *****, guys!

Ok... I'm not sure if the following suggestions will work with Filevault 2 enabled. I guess you can try after you create a backup for safety.
You can recreate the Recovery HD two ways. One is to reinstall Lion using a bootable USB thumb drive of the Recovery HD created with the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. Or from a bootable USB thumb drive with the Lion installer restored to it.
A second way, which I have used many times, is to follow the instuctions at this site using Terminal commands. Step 3 is what you want to follow. The instructions use the RecoveryHDUpdate.dmg file downloaded from Apple to recreate the Recovery HD. It works great!

How do I safely stop a Time Machine Restore midway through?

I started a Time Machine restore from backup at about 1pm this afternoon.
After about 15 minutes of estimating the size of the files to be transferred, it gave me a 19hr estimate for transfer time. I had heard that it could take awhile, so I wasn't totally blown away by the number.
I'm backing up about 200 GB. Well, I'm about 2 hours into it, and the time remaining has been fluctuating from 19+ hours to 14 hours. I'm at about 18 hours right now.
I'm beginning to question the ethernet cable I'm using to transfer the data, and wishing I used a USB 2.0. I've also read up on a bunch of other threads about how painfully slow Time Machine can be, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason as to when it's slow vs when it's somewhat reasonable.
So, I guess there are two questions.
Question 1) Can I safely power down, swap cables, and retry? What happens to the data that's already been pulled over?
Question 2) Should I just let it run for the next 18 hrs? I've also read other horror stories where people return to their machines after the time estimated, and it's hardly budged.
Any help would be AWESOME! If i could give you a billion help points, i would!

majmanMac wrote:
Was doing a full restore from scratch - I lost a hard drive on Monday, and just got a new one put in. Turns out the estimate was about right, as I'm now writing this from my restored machine.
Yay!
I was restoring from a Time Capsule. For some reason I just assumed it had a USB port.
Ah, yes, it does, but it's for connecting a printer or USB drive, not a Mac.
My concern that i would come back to it this morning and find it still updating has been put to rest. Phew!
Glad it's sorted out, but it does seem like there may be a problem -- that's awfully slow. See #D2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
And be forewarned: since you have a new drive, Time Machine's next backup will almost certainly be a full one, so remain connected via Ethernet. If there isn't enough free space for that, it will take an extremely long time for Time Machine to delete a lot of old backups to make room. You might consider manually deleting a lot of them, per #12 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Can I use a Time Machine restore from an older OS to Mavericks?

I ask because I tried about 2 years ago and had no luck. Here's a little back-story so my situation isn't confusing...
My iMac (2010) has been having tons of issues lately. More specifically, when I attempted to upgrade to Mavericks last week, it came back with S.M.A.R.T. errors after a scan, so it wouldn't allow me to update. So, in preparation for the HDD to crap out on me, I did frequent back-ups using Time Machine. Well, the day finally came and my iMac won't "turn on" anymore. When I turn it on, it sits at the Mac loading screen for several minutes and then just goes to a blank white screen. (NOTE: This isn't part of my question but if anyone has any suggestions on fixing this, please let me know, thanks!)
So, back to my question. If I buy a new iMac or a new macbook or whatever, will it be possible to use my Time Machine back-ups to restore everything on it or will it not allow me to because the operating systems are different? As mentioned, I attempted to make a restore on my friend's macbook that I purchased as a spare but when I tried, it came back saying "Different operating systems, cannot restore" or something to that degree. Is there a way around this? Do I have to somehow downgrade the OS on my new machine?
Luckily, I use iTunes for all my movies/music & Adobe Creative cloud so I can easily restore those on any machine but my desktop personal data, photos, etc are on the Time Machine restore. Help me if you can, thanks in advance!

If you live near an Apple Store, make a Genius Bar appointment to have the computer tested. Supposedly there is no charge for testing. They can also give you an estimate.
Genius Bar Reservation US

How do I know which id to delete and insure time machine restore?

I had a glitch on my computer of the screen going black at random. I also had a recall on my imac for the segate drive which was replaced once. I brought it to the apple store after a week then determined there was no recall on my new drive and reinstalled Mt Lion to get rid of the black screen issue. Now here is the problem i got home and plugged in my ext drive for a time machine restore. I restored everthing using migrate assitant except the applications and desktop. I was asked to create another user name for the transfer. I don't understand why i had to do this so just slightly changed my id name. I now need to find the desktop data and can't find it under either names. I searched the drive direct and found the info is there but migrate assitant doesn't show it. I tryed to restore back some other files but it was me to changed the name of the restore using migrate assitant again. How many ids do I need? How do I blow way the 2nd id without gettting rid of my backup on the ext drive. I am so confussed now and can't figure out which admin id has the info and which doesn't . I don't even know if the info made it to the imac hard drive. help!!!

I had a glitch on my computer of the screen going black at random. I also had a recall on my imac for the segate drive which was replaced once. I brought it to the apple store after a week then determined there was no recall on my new drive and reinstalled Mt Lion to get rid of the black screen issue. Now here is the problem i got home and plugged in my ext drive for a time machine restore. I restored everthing using migrate assitant except the applications and desktop. I was asked to create another user name for the transfer. I don't understand why i had to do this so just slightly changed my id name. I now need to find the desktop data and can't find it under either names. I searched the drive direct and found the info is there but migrate assitant doesn't show it. I tryed to restore back some other files but it was me to changed the name of the restore using migrate assitant again. How many ids do I need? How do I blow way the 2nd id without gettting rid of my backup on the ext drive. I am so confussed now and can't figure out which admin id has the info and which doesn't . I don't even know if the info made it to the imac hard drive. help!!!

My Macbook Pro was stolen, and I have replaced it with a Macbook Air. New hard drive is too small for a Time Machine restore. How do I restore my more-expensive apps (ie iWorks) on my new Macbook without repurchasing them?

My Macbook Pro was recently stolen, and I have replaced it with a Macbook Air. I attempted to simply do a restore from the Macbook Pro's Time Machine backup, but since the new Macbook Air's hard drive is significantly smaller, a Time Machine restore was not possible. I even tried to choose only settings or only my User Profile (option) when restoring, but the backup was still too large to do a restore onto the new machine. How do I restore my more-expensive apps (ie iWorks) onto my new Macbook without repurchasing them? Also, I reaad somewhere that if you went to the Mac App Store and attempted to repurchase the app and clicked BUY, it would simply alert you that you have already purchased the app (and trigger a re-download)... NOT THE CASE... So I just dropped another $19.99 for a second copy of Pages... Not my intention....
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
LM

you should get a usb backup drive as well. time machine has limited use in my eyes. it saves things. but older things can be errased ad space drops without telling you
nothing beats data redundancy. 2 saves is. 1. and 1 is none
im personally not fond of time machne though i use it only for a recovery parameter for a mac
id never ever myself consider time machine a genuine data backup tool. though most do consider it as such
drive clones such as superduper and carbon copy cloner can clone your entire drive for emergency recovery. and you can boot from them as well o. another mac

Is it possible to boot or Time Machine restore from an external Thunderbolt disk drive?

(There are several questions - search for "?".)
I purchased a Seagate Backup Plus for Mac Desktop Drive 3 TByte with default USB 3.0 interface, and also acquired the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter for Backup Plus Desktop Drives and Thunderbolt cable.
I do a redundant backup to the Seagate Drive using both Carbon Copy Cloner (nightly) and Time Machine (hourly) using its Thunderbolt adapter. BTW: One never knows when Time Machine will choke - see discussion titled, "UPDATED: Serious Time Machine bug on Mountain Lion", which I had; Rest In Peace Pondini (James Lewis Pond).
Booting from the external Seagate Backup Plus via Thunderbolt inteface from System Preferences -> Startup Disk:
I select the Time Machine OS X, 10.8.5 Startup Disk (Thunderbolt attached drive), click Restart, confirm my choice, the computer reboots, however, it reboots from the internal Macintosh HD OS X, 10.8.5, NOT the selected external Thunderbolt drive. The SSD drive was used as the Startup Drive, not the selected external Time Machine volume as indicated by the display free disk space command (df(1)) and seeing that the Macintosh HD OS X, 10.8.5 volume is mounted as root. That is very deceptive in that both the internal and external drives will appear in the same manner from a GUI point of view! OS X doesn't even inform me that it did not boot off the selected volume. This is the first half of the problem, that is, Is it possible to boot from an external Thunderbolt disk drive? In my case, the answer is deceptively No. Can anybody else boot off a Thuderbolt attached disk drive? Note that if I remove the Thunderbolt adapter, and attach the drive via its USB 3.0 cable, the MBP boots off the external Seagate Backup Plus just fine, as is expected.
Booting from the external Seagate Backup Plus via Thunderbolt inteface from boot-time "Option - Select startup disk" method:
When I restart the MBP using the startup Option key to select the startup volume, the externally connected Seagate drive ONLY SHOWS UP if it is attached with the USB 3.0 cable, not when it is attached with via the Thunderbolt interface. Can anyone else boot off a Thunderbolt drive with the startup Option key sequence? At least the MBP doesn't deceive me in this case - I know right away that the external Thunderbolt drive is not an option when connected as such.
Time Machine restore from the external Seagate Backup plus via Thunderbolt interface from the "command-R - Recovery Parition" method:
After booting from the recovery partition, I attempt to perform a Time Machine restore from the Thunderbolt connected Seagate Backup drive. When Time Machine attempts to present me with a viable backup Time Machine volume, the external Thunderbolt drive is never offered as an option. So I switch the Time Machine volume to use its USB 3.0 interface, and then Time Machine displays that drive as an option, and the MBP proceeds with the restoration as expected. The interesting thing to note is that while booted in the recovery partition via the Thuderbolt cable, the MBP Disk Utility may be selected, and the Thunderbolt attached drive may be operated on just fine. Can anybody else restore their MBP using Time Machine and the Recovery Partition via the Thunderbolt interface?
This is also a big problem for me in that I am forced to restore my MBP via Carbon Copy Cloner using the USB 3.0 interface, because I cannot even boot off that volume's Thunderbolt interface. Of course, the option may be that I could use yet another eternal USB 3.0 drive, boot from it, and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore the Macintosh HD via the aforementioned drive connected by a Thunderbolt cable, but that is less than ideal and not elegant, so I'm not going there.
Another side issue is that the commercially available program, TechTool Pro 7's eDrive, which I installed on the Time Machine volume, will not boot off that eDrive as advertised, but I won't got through those steps here, because that would be beyond the scope of this issue, however, I must say, It does not work either when the Time Machine volume is connected via the Thunderbolt interface, but works just fine when connected via the USB 3.0 interface.

If this helps anybody else make a decision about whether to consider Apple because of Apple's superior customer service:
Apple sells this entire line of drives right in their store, from 1TB to 4TB. I spent 1 and 1/2 hours, yesterday, confirming that the 3TB model IS NOT 100% Thunderbolt compliant. A MBP cannot boot, nor can it Time Machine restore from this drive, though EVERYTHING about the drive is normal.
Apple's South Coast Plaza store management had at least two responses to me personally about how to proceed:
1. Buy a different drive from another drive manufacturer, and to attempt to return the drive to COSTCO. A lead genius suggested going with GTech drives, for instance.
2. Wait for Seagate to fix their problem.
I told Apple management in the store that the drive is advertised as Mac Compatible (see picture) and that it is advertised as being a Thunderbolt drive (see picture). I pressed management that my purchasing decsion to get the best possible MBP Retina was based on the availablity of Inexpensive Devises (raID), and that not having this complete compatibility is a show-stopper for my needs, and that I wanted a refund. Their response? They needed to talk with "Merchendising" to see if they are on or off the hook for these kind of 3rd party assertions, and would get back to me.
I am not holding my breath.
Note: I do not hold this against the Geniuses that helped me, nor against the management I've dealt with, nor the upper level engineers that I've corresponded with through Apple Care - their problem solving skills were helpful - although I could have arrived at similar conclusions given enough $$$. (For instance, try a Lacie TB drive and see if that works - we did, and it did not work. Or, we have a different TB cable and a different TB adapter, let's try those - we did, and it did not work.) I blame myself for not doing enough homework before going with Apple's solutions.

Time Machine Restore Mangles Permissions and Groups

Circumstance:
My Macbook Pro running 10.5.5 gave a gray spinner after a restart last week. The restart was to clear out a couple of system processes eating up CPU when I had left it alone for a few hours.
Action:
After Disk Utility, zapping PRAM, and the probably some other standard trouble-shooting actions didn't fix the stuck start-up problem, I decided to try a full system restore from my Time Machine backups. I had previously successfully restored individual folders and files. Time Machine backs up wireless to a USB hard drive connected to my AirPort Extreme. To speed up the restore, I ran an Ethernet cable to the MBP from the Airport. The restore completed successfully. All the folders & files are correct, looks the same, etc. I restarted using the restored boot drive.
Problem:
The MBP is like a museum now--I can look but I can't touch. I first noticed something was wrong after logging in the first time because I couldn't move a file into a folder via drag-n-drop. Then Terminal went into a spinning beach ball when I opened it. Spotlight was not running. Then I noticed that my entire boot disk was read-only. I got info on the boot disk, and the Users & Groups list was strange--everyone was read-only, "wheel" had read-write and was the owner, and staff had read-write. Basically, it's like me, the Finder, an all applications have lost all their write/execute permissions on the entire drive.
*Unsuccessful Steps Taken:*
Ran Disk Utilities' Repair Permissions from Leopard dvd. Ran fsck -fy after mount / -uw from Leopard dvd Terminal and from single-user boot mode. Time Machine restore direct from TM disk via USB. Joined my user to wheel group. Changed my user password from Leopard dvd (which repairs home folder permissions). Played with chown to make all wheel-owned items staff-owned.
*Open Theories:*
Airport Time Machine restores strips ACLs and Permissions. I have to restore over wireless, not ethernet or usb. My TM backup is screwed up somehow.
Whew. This has been going on for a while, so I'm ready to give up and do an Archive & Install and begin manual migration from the backups, but my MPB is a fine-tuned machine and I hate to lose that, especially since it taunts me by being so close to normal (I can see everything! My desktop background and apps are there!).
Any help much appreciated!

The "full restore" from Time Machine is only for OSX drives.
For data-only drives, use the Time Machine browser (the "Star Wars" display). See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #15.
Depending on your setup, you may also want to review Transferring Home Folders not on a Startup volume.

Can Time Machine restore to a new internal HDD?

hi all, i've got a 1tb external drive that's exclusively used by Time Machine. the 1tb drive is connected to my 500gb mac mini. i've been running time machine for 6 months now daily, i just wanted to know if it was backing up everything on my 500gb drive or not. how can i check that it's working properly?
also, does anyone know how i'd go about restoring my mac mini in case i had to replace the 500gb hdd? can time machine restore everything if i needed it to? if i bought a new HDD tomorrow for example, how could i get my system running back to where it was running today with all of the current settings and files etc? is there any way for me to check that Time Machine will actually restore OS X, all my videos, music and my work should the HDD actually die?
is there an apple link i can read?
thanks for any help.

To answer your question about replacing a hard drive and recovering what was on your old one ...
Yes, Time Machine was designed for that. You may have one of two scenarios:
(1) Your hard drive is replaced by the Apple Store or another Apple repair shop, in which case they usually restore it with the operating system you had before and configure it so it has a new system with no users set up; the first time it starts up it runs Setup Assistant. When Setup Assistant runs, you select the option to restore from a Time Machine backup. It will then automatically restore your entire hard drive to the newly installed one. Everything will be just as it was with the old drive. Exceptions: you MAY have to enter user keys for software like MS-Office and Adobe Photoshop. and you MAY have to reinstall your printers and scanners.
(2) If the hard drive is replaced but no operating system or anything is put on it, you need to boot from your Install-OS-DVD and install a new operating system on the new drive. Then, on the first reboot, Setup Assistant runs and you can follow the instructions from (1) above.
A good informational site about Time Machine is here: http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
How do you know that your Time Machine backup is a good one? You can peruse through all the backups by running Time Machine and manually inspect that the files in those key folders (photos, music etc.) are all there and have the right sizes. You can "test recover" selected folders to a scratch location just to check that it works. I suggest you obtain another external drive and use it to make a "clone" of your internal drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. This is like a second backup, a failsafe in case, say, your Time Machine drive were to fail. This is not unheard of, since a power failure could cause both your internal drive and Time Machine drives to crash at the same time. The "clone" should be unplugged and stored separately to avoid this issue. You can update the clone, say once a week or once a month.

Cannot view photos after a Time Machine restore.

Hello,
I am running iPhoto 09 version 8.1.2. I attempted to install the SL 10.6.3 update on 3/31 and all of my CIFS shares become slow and unresponsive to the point they were not useable. I chose to do a full Time Machine restore from the TM backup I had initiated just prior to the 10.6.3 upgrade. Now the last 40 pictures I imported on 3/28 appear in the events but when i click on them I get the screen. I selected the iPhoto Library and exposed the contents of the package and the none of the pictures are in the originals directory. Why are the thumbnails still present but the photos are missing? i thought about performing a library rebuild, but it does not make sense if i cannot find the originals.
Your help is greatly appreciated

No there's no point in making a rebuild if the originals are not present. As to why this happened? More a question for the Time Machine folks.
Regards
TD

Upgrading: Migration Assistant with FireWire or Time Machine Restore?

Hello,
I recently ordered a new Black Penryn MacBook to replace my 17" iMac. Would you recommend using the Migration Assistant with FireWire or a Time Machine restore in order to copy all of my data to the MacBook? I have the option to do both, but am unsure of which would be the best. Is the time machine restore more suited to restore a failed drive as opposed to facilitating a data transfer between two machines? Finally, regarding either of the transfer options, will there be any issues with keychain or application data that I should be aware of? Thanks for your help!

Those are two of the option presented by Migration Assistant. I think the end result will be the same. If I was doing it, I'd use the FireWire method, just because it's coming directly from the source instead of through a backup archive structure.

HT3275 Does Time Machine restore iWeb projects?

I was working in iWeb when it suddenly quit. When it restarted, everything I had done this morning was gone.
Does Time Machine restore this? If so, how do I do it?

Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Time machine restore help

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