Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Have recently completed my first restore of an entire computer using a Time Machine backup disk, and I have to say that (unsurprisingly), Apple have got this sewn up much better than the competition.
The issue was a failed hard disk. As I often have to explain; hard disks are mechanical devices with spinning parts, bearings, magnetic surfaces and moving arms inside. Sooner or later, they tend to go wrong. This is why you need backups.
Apple OS X offers Time Machine; a mechanism for performing automatic, regular backups to an external hard disk. This is better than Windows' Shadow Copy, which creates "restore points" on the internal disk, as we'll see.
In the situation I was facing, the hard disk in a MacBook had died. Click click clunk. Fortunately, the user had followed some sage advice and used an external hard disk for Time Machine backups. This is where Apple's solution is superior; Windows Restore Points would have been no use at all here, as they'd have been lost with the internal hard disk.
So, we replaced the failed disk in the laptop with a new, bigger, faster model. This is not uncommon; the old disk was maybe 3.5 years old, and disk technology moves on in that sort of time frame.
Next, we booted from an install DVD and used Disk Utility to partition and format the new disk before selecting to restore from a Time Machine backup. Follow the wizard, connect the backup hard disk and let it run for a few hours.
And this is really why I'm posting; it didn't work smoothly. After the restore had finished, we were prompted to reboot. System duly restarts, and then hangs at the "grey" bootup screen with the little spinner going.
I was gutted; this should "just work". My hunch is that the change in hard disk hardware somehow confused the process; Apple - please fix this!! - anyone with a failed disk will replace it with a bigger, better unit.
The solution was to perform a re-install of OS X. Note that in Snow Leopard, there is no longer an "Archive and Install" option; you just install over the top of what you have, and trust it to do the right thing. Once OS X had been re-installed, the laptop booted up with all data and settings from the restore present and correct.
The final step was then to download and apply the latest combo update for 10.6; the restore was from a 10.6.6 backup, but we were now back at 10.6 due to the OS X reinstall. After that, usual software updates to bring all up to date and we were back in business.
Before I'm accused of being a Mac zealot or Microsoft basher, I'm not. I do believe that on the whole, Apple tend to make better consumer computer systems, and that the underpinnings of the software are much better in OS X than in Windows, but nothing is perfect. This is illustrated by the "Archive and Install" required above (and I have other Apple gripes, too).
However, this is another example of Apple getting it right. Yes, you can make restorable backups of Windows 7 on external disks, but this makes a "system image" that is separate and different from a "file backup". I also interpret the Windows solution to be creating a new compressed image file for each system image backup. That's using 50% of the space on your primary disk for each backup. Finally, to configure Windows backup and restore, you have to navigate through pages of wizard menus.
Just for completeness, Linux has always had rsync which can be used very effectively by the command-line script aficionado for incremental data backups, and there are a few GUI-based tools such as flyback that promise a simpler method, but as is often the case with Linux, it's just not quite feature-complete yet....... (although the implementation of sbackup on Ubuntu does look quite promising).
The beauty of Time Machine is that you plug in an external disk, are asked if you want to use it for backup and click yes. That's it. Hourly backups are taken and kept for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the last month and weekly backups until you run out of space (at which point the oldest backups are automatically deleted). If you use a laptop, just plug your backup drive in when you can, and backups will be taken. Since backups are incremental forever, you get a lot of restore points on a Time Machine disk (mine goes back a couple of years, for example). Best of all, it's not just restore points; you can restore your entire system from these backups, too. Oh, and there's a shiny UI for this as well, that makes restoring files engaging and understandable for the non-techie.
This is how it should be - backup protection made easy. The fact that an external disk is used is right - it protects you against internal hard drive failure (or a lost or stolen laptop). The fact that it's easy is also right - non techies can and will use it.
Just fix the re-install issue, please Apple…….
