blackrimglasses.com

Well, actually it was yesterday. My computer at work (a Quad Core Mac Pro, 4 500mb drives) was acting super flaky, and I fully intended to take it offline and run disk warrior on it. Yesterday I had to rearrange my office because I got a new desk (a vintage Eames conference table!) and when I brought the computer back up, it’d start launching all my login items, then die.

When I rebooted from a startup disk, Disk Utility couldn’t fix the disk and crapped out. Then Disk Warrior mounting from another machine through Target Disk Mode would also crash.

Uh-oh.

As a side note: I keep one of the 500 meg drives in my machine completely empty and unmounted for the specific purpose that if the machine dies, or I need to test a new OS, I have a spare boot disk.

I had a Time Machine backup from 5AM that day, so I rebooted from Leopard install, selected “Restore from Time Machine Backup” and crossed my fingers. It allowed me to specify the volume to restore to, and which snapshot to use.

Queue 5 hours of waiting and then….

System rebooted, and it was like walking into a … well, Time Machine. The machine was restored EXACTLY like it was at 5AM that day. The e-mail, everything was the same. Once it caught up, all was back to normal. I wiped the former master drive (it was a node corruption, which is hard to fix without a format) and everything was great.

Lesson: invest in a Time Machine disk that is equal to double the size of your master drive.