Apple's "Time Machine"

[thisisian]

Here's the story.....

At the weekend my MacBook pro fell off a bed on to a hard laminate floor. This resulted in a lappy that refused to start up. I checked it on another apple lappy (starting up my MBP in "target" mode), & the other machine couldn't see the drive over firewire either.

Luckily, I regularly back up to an external drive using Time Machine. So I popped down to my local apple reseller, brought a new drive, & restored from my time machine backup.

Total time to install the new HD & pull everything back from my time machine backup. ....about 4 hours!!

What impressed me the most is that you don't even have to re-install OS X on the new drive first. Just make sure it's formatted using disk utility on the OSX install DVD, then select the time machine app from the utilities menu & follow the instructions.

So if you're an apple user & you don't use time machine (or Carbon copy cloner or something similar), then now is the time to start. ....you'll be glad you did if you ever need it.

[photojojo]

Preaching to the choir brother.

[fullenglishpint]

agreed. My dad had his macbook nicked from a hotel room a couple of years ago but he had a time machine backup at home, bought a new one with the insurance money and when he'd restored it it was like using the same computer (except the new one was a different colour

I used mine to switch over to my SSD and again, it worked flawlessly.

[Nesquigs]

^^^ditto

[djproben]

Just don't rely on time machine to backup your iphoto library. Time machine is great but when it fails it does so spectacularly.