Restore from backup - bringing a Mac back with Time Capsule
My brother called and told me my mom was in the hospital. At 80 her health has been declining pretty rapidly so I immediately booked a flight to California, planning to spend a week there to help my brother with both her and my father. Needless to say I had a lot on my mind as I rushed to the airport in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning last week.Back at home my wife's MacBook sat at her desk, left on overnight like she often did so that when she woke up in the morning a quick shake of the mouse would brighten the screen and allow her to check e-mail. From what I can tell in the hourly backup logs, at roughly the same time my aircraft lifted off the runway the 120GB hard disk in her MacBook crashed.
When I checked in with my wife that night to update her on my mom's status, she told me that her MacBook was dead.
Me: "Dead?"
Allison: "It's just got a gray screen. I've tried restarting it and that's all that comes up."
Of course, this has to happen when the only techie in the family leaves on a weeklong trip. Fortunately for us my wife's MacBook is backed up regularly using Time Machine pointing at a Time Capsule. To make a really long story short, I tried to get our 14 year old daughter to install a replacement drive into the MacBook. The salesman at BestBuy sold her the wrong drive so after trying to jam a PATA drive into a SATA slot, she gave up until I returned home.
Bringing Back a Dead Mac
When I came home from California I promptly returned the incorrect drive and picked up a Western Digital 320GB black drive instead. Fast, high capacity, good reviews and I've had excellent luck with WD drives in the past. The installation was a snap as I've done this before.
I did encounter a problem when I first tried restoring my data though. Having purchased a number of different Macs over the last two years, I had quite a few OS X install disks lying around, including several for MacBooks since my wife and both daughters have them. Apparently I was using the wrong one because it would not allow me to do a restore from the Mac OS X Install Disc. Once I figured out the correct disk everything went much more smoothly. If you have multiple Macs you may want to label your disk sets to ensure they match up w/ the right Mac.
First I used Disk Utility to format the drive as a single large partition using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Next, from the OS X Installer menu I ran the restore utility. By following the prompts I was able to select our Time Capsule and choose the correct bundle on it for my wife's machine.
Though I normally access the network from her machine using WiFi, I took a standard ethernet cable and plugged it directly into the Time Capsule to help speed up the process. It ended up taking about 3 hours to restore her machine. Once restored a quick reboot returned her machine to its pre-hard-drive-crash state.
The Importance of Backups
Do yourself a favor right now: check the status of your backup and—if you're the techie in the family—do that for all the computers in your home. Make sure it's running properly and that you have a basic game plan for the day your primary (or secondary) hard drive fails. Your hard drive will eventually fail. It may not happen for ten years, several months or as you are reading this but it will eventually fail.
As more and more of our lives are captured digitally, backups are more important than ever. If all you do is set up Time Machine to point at a remote drive at least you have something to fall back on.
And for those that are interested, my mom is doing much better. My brother and I moved our parents into assisted living apartments. They have help with meals, medical care on site and lots of other folks to interact with. It's the ultimate backup system for the elderly.
Do you have a backup technique you use that may help others? Please share it below!
Comments
I backup all my priceless stuff (music, photos, work files, etc.) to an external hard drive as well as off-site via Mozy. This comprises almost 200gb of data, and it all sites on a drive separate from my boot drive. My boot drive gets backed up via SuperDuper to another internal drive, so if the primary drive fails, I can be up and running in minutes. I also test this secondary boot drive every so often to be sure this backup plan actually works (crucial step many don't do). I don't off-site backup this boot drive, because there's nothing really valuable on it. Worst case scenario is that I have to spend a couple hours reinstalling and updating OS X if both drives fail at the same time.
I actually don't backup the Macbook Pro at all. It's my portable machine, so any working files are synced (and thus backed up) via Dropbox, so I also have them on my MacPro and in the cloud. Again, if this HD goes belly up, all I have to do is re-install the OS and (just a couple) apps, and I'm good to go.
Not perfect, but it protects the things I need to protect most.
One final note is that I have lived through multiple HD failures - both in a corporate environment and personally - and it royally sucks - and as David said, it DOES and WILL happen to you. Don't say we didn't warn you.
It's convoluted but it works for having stuff on hard drives, backed up in the house for easy retrieval, and backed up remotely in case of disaster or theft.
Still there are problems. The biggest problem lies with Time Machine itself. David, you alluded to it in this blog entry. I have tell people this one over and over and they still don't do it:
> check the status of your backup
The problem is that there is no _obvious_ indication that the backup has failed. Most people, even ones who know better, ignore the error indicator in Time Machine menu. They're busy and easily miss it. I've done it myself. Only when they get the message that the backup has not been done for 20 days, do they call me. But this message is easy to dismiss in a rush, so sometimes they wait even longer.
In case anybody is wondering why the backup might fail, here are some common reasons for individuals:
- Time Machine backup setting is simply turned off.
- The backup drive is disconnected.
- The backup drive is connected, but the power is not.
- The backup drive is connected, but the disk has been ejected.
- The backup drive image on the Time Capsule has been corrupted.
- The Time Capsule is not available as a backup because the computer's WiFi is not connected to the Time Capsule. Instead it's connected to the neighbor's WiFi.
Another issue related to this one is that when someone travels with their laptop, it's usually not connected to a Time Capsule or to a backup drive. During this time, there is a different but similar looking error indication in the Time Machine menu. This error indication is normal during travel, but it can desensitize someone to the indication that there is no backup at all.
It's impossible for normal people to distinguish between the indicator saying it's not backing up at this instant because of travel, and the indicator saying it's not backing up at all. It's also impossible during travel to tell when the last backup occurred.
Businesses sometimes have more complicated reasons but in the end they are similar.
Mike
I did once have have had two hard drives fail simultaneously, one was the backup of the other. Lucky for me, that although the first failed instantaneously, the second failed over several hours allowing me to copy the data to a third drive.
I have also known people who have had their computer stolen along with their backup. Bad. Try to keep your backup drive physically away from your computer, especially when traveling.
It's a shame that Time Machine doesn't work automatically with dual backups. To make dual backups work, the settings must be manually changed each time the disks are swapped. I doubt that many people would do this reliably.
The best way that I've found for businesses, is to have a Mac OS X Snow Leopard machine acting as a backup server. For under ten machines, the server version of OS X is not required, and neither is a fast machine. Everyone backs up to the drive on the backup server. The server itself has a time machine backup to a separate disk. So this makes dual backups.
For offsite backups, this disk is periodically swapped with another disk. The preference changes are still necessary, but it does work if the person who makes the swap and the changes is charged with the responsibility to be sure it's done properly.
Still, somebody must be responsible for doing this on all machines:
> check the status of your backup
@Paul: Some great info in there - thanks for including that. I agree, for the average person Time Machine is outstanding.
@Mike: Also wise words. Sometimes HDs fail because they are involved in a house fire.
Anyone struck this situation?
I learned a lesson about checking your backups. I do not have a Time Capsule. I backup my MacBook Pro to an external drive so I just run it manually once a week. I would start it and walk away. I did not notice it was finishing pretty quickly.
There's one thing that everybody needs to know about using Time Machine. It finished pretty quickly because it was just backing up the changes on the system not my home directory. It wasn't backing up my home directory because I had File Vault enabled. It can only back up your home directory when you are logged out if you have File Vault enabled. I've never read anything about that anywhere. I looked on Apple's Support site and it does say something about that. How many people go to Apple's website before they use something? It's so easy to use so you don't need to.
Luckily I didn't loose too much. My email and bookmarks are stored on the server. I only had File Vault enacted for a few months when I needed to use my backup when I installed Snow Leopard. I decided to run a clean install instead of an archive and install like I did with Leopard. I thought starting completely fresh would be good. Luckily I burned my photos to DVD or I would have lost those which included by wedding and honeymoon photos. Apple should have some kind of warning pop up when you enable File Vault.
Sleepydude
Unlike when I used to do the old 6 monthly reinstall of my Windows PC (for speed recovery!), which also subsequently involved installing all the patches, reinstalling all the apps, then applying all their patches, the process of restoring from Time Machine only necessitated my spotlight indexes being built from scratch. The whole process post-hard disk being replaced, was 1 hour. Can't speak highly enough of this whole experience, 1 hour vs the usual 4-5 hours I certainly appreciate the saved time.
The biggest impact that the drive speed has is on larger files. When you open or write something large to disk (say digital media, photos, video, etc) you'll see a noticeable improvement. Generally speaking a faster drive will have a quicker seek time as well, which has the biggest impact on general performance.
Usually though the performance difference you will observe in real world conditions is not dramatic, but it is noticeable. Hope this helps!
I use ministack hard drives from OtherWorldComputing. I don't think there are comparable hard drives or customer service (I seriously don't work for them).
I use Super Duper to clone a bootable drive and it works flawlessly and time capsule with another ministack (3tb). My time machine kept filling up even after configuring it not copy non-essentials so I rely more heavily on the super duper backups which have saved me more than once.
I think the challenge for all of us "techies" is to ensure all of the "non-techies" that come to us for help are running a solid backup plan. Most of the non-techies I know don't even think about it.