2 Ways Time Machine Saved My Mac

Like an insurance policy, you need your backup when the you-know-what is hitting the fan. In this case, my Mac wasn't working at ALL. A hard restart only got me a blue screen and a cursor. What do I do now? I can't even get my Mac started to see what the problem is.

So like always, I do a quick Google search (on another Mac) right off the bat to see if anyone else has had the same problem and found a solution to it. In this case, the search brought up a LOT of people having a stuck blue screen after upgrading to Leopard, but that wasn't my issue. I just got stuck on the screen after normal use.

So I thought about taking the next steps in 6 Steps to Solve Your Mac Problem, not looking forward to a few hours of mucking around. Then I recalled seeing a headline over at Daring Fireball linking to an article over at James Duncan Davidson's Blog, Restoring From Time Machine. Hmmm… this sounds like something I should look into.

Sure enough, if you have been backing up your whole drive with Time Machine, you can restore it all at once. My thinking was that if my Mac was working fine yesterday, I can save myself the hassle and just dial it back to yesterday and hope for the best.

The trick to doing the full Restore process is that you need to insert your install DVD and boot from that (hold down "c" when starting up). Once it starts up from the System install disc, you can choose the menu item, Restore System from Backup.

And wait…

That's the only real downside. It takes the full amount of time to copy all that info back over from your backup drive.

And then there was this: When Mail started back up after being restored, it wanted to re-import my mail messages. I hit cancel before thinking, trying to get on to the other things I needed to do. Well, passing that up left me with no mail in my mailboxes.

Then it occurred to me, I could use the everyday function of Time Machine to just go back in time and grab my mail messages from yesterday and get back up to date. I figure my mail server is still keeping the ones from the past few days to download again, so going back a little bit shouldn't mess me up.

So I used Time Machine to go back and get my Mail folder from Users>Chris>Library>Mail. That did it. Now I was back in the saddle and ready to go.

There you have it: 2 ways to use Time Machine to save your Mac. Do you have any good Time Machine tips to share? Let us know in the Comments section below!

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