Tuesday 3 June 2008

TimeCapsule & TimeMachine saved my ass!

My MacBookPro died on me. It kinda kept freezing so I did a hard reboot then after that it wouldn't boot at all :) Took it to the Apple Store; they figured out it was some kinda disc corruption; so wiped the disk (after managing to restore the files I was hacking on, bless that genius at the bar), reinstalled Leopard and things are OK (the disk may be faulty, we'll see soon).

Luckily the TimeCapsule had all my stuff so I could use the Migration Assistant to restore my apps & user accounts from the backup on the Time Machine. The UI did freak me out a bit - when the thing started it kept saying 'connecting...' then hanging for ages. I kept thinking it wasn't working so trying all kinds of things. Turns out, its just wacky slow. The next screen shows the list of user accounts - again thats wacky slow - takes maybe an hour for a 100Gb backup to show the few user accounts in the backup!

The 2 massive delays in the UI are kinda irritating; I mean why can't it keep a little index of what machines & users its got in the backup and let me pick 'em in a second then leave the thing for a few hours while it restores?

Anyway - all is well - once I got past the 2nd screen, chose the things to restore I left it chugging away for a few hours and I'm now restored. The only thing I've missed so far is I had to reinstall my VPN client as it shoved stuff in /System and maven is hardwired in /usr/bin to point to mvn 2.0.6 in /usr/share - other than that it worked fine.

One final tip if you try and restore from Time Capsule/Time Machine; when you reinstall Leopard don't create a user account with the same ID as the one you are gonna restore - as the Migration Assistant forced me to rename the restored one (which caused some problems that took me a little while and some 'chown'ing to fix :).

Other than those little gremlins; nice job Apple! If I ever have another catastrophic failure, the next restore should be pretty painless

1 comment:

Stephen Cresswell said...

FYI There's a known problem with macbook pros. Recommendation is to keep you laptop still for a few seconds after shutting it down. Reminds me of the good old days when you had to park your heads.

http://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/blog/30-12-2006/mac-book-pro-hard-disk-failure