After my Mac is back from repair I had the first chance to try Time Machine’s restore feature. 3 hours later for 70 GB of restored data my system is up and running again.
The whole process (putting in the OSX DVD, booting into the installer, selecting Time Machine restore from the menu and selecting the point in time the backup should be used from) is so simple, even your grandma will be able to do it.
After booting you are back at your desktop. There are very little oddities:
Mail.app thinks to see a mail database from Tiger, although it’s not. Looks like Time Machine does not store some index and it has to recreate it. No problem, 2 minutes later it’s fine.
Spotlight reindexes my whole harddrive.
Last but not least: I cannot see my old backups anymore in Time Machine. This in fact can be a proof that Gravis really replaced my mainboard during repair. A look at the external disk shows that he started a new “time line” for “goedel 2″, thinking that it’s a different computer now.
Altogether the whole restore was what you expect from Time Machine: a no brainer.
Für alle ungeduldigen und besonders hypochondrisch veranlagten Mac-Benutzer sei das Folgende ans Herz gelegt: sudo fs_usage -f filesys (Tipp von hier). Wenn es mal wieder länger dauert und der Regenbogencursor auf die Nerven geht… Damit ist der Übeltäter schnell ausgemacht, und den Nerven gehts wieder besser.
If you hear the harddisk of your Mac all the time, even when you are not doing anything on the computer, here is the right tool to find out what is going on:
It basically shows you the same data that Spotlight uses to find changed files, some kernel device of the OSX kernel. Very very useful indeed.
