Attention Mac Users

[catrancher]

Be a bit careful with Time Machine.

I had to replace my hard drive in my MacBook Pro yesterday. Ran that 320Gb one I had clean out of space. So, I went and got a 640Gb replacement drive. By the way, that's what I was pinging you about yesterday Keith. Anyway, figured I try to do a restore from my Time Machine backups. So, I installed the new drive, booted from my Snow Leopard installation DVD, formatted the new drive, and restored the whole system from my Time Machine backups. This was late yesterday so I let the restore run all night.

When I got up this morning, everything had finished fine, so I rebooted my machine off the new drive. Seemed to come up OK. Or so I thought. Launched Safari. It immediately died. Tried it again. Same thing. Tried to launch Mail. It too died. Same error messages in the log for both programs! Some problem with the UI delegate.

I didn't spend much time trying to run down the error. I really wanted to get my machine back up and running. So, since I still had the original disk drive I had taken out of my Macbook, I just popped it into an external drive caddie and rebooted my Mac off that. Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make the new disk drive in my Mac a carbon copy of the old one. That worked fine (witness the fact that I'm using my machine again)!

The moral of the story I guess is that if you're using Time Machine as your exclusive backup mechanism, you "may" want to do something else from time to time. Like make a duplicate boot disk on an external drive.

I wish I had had time to diagnose what went wrong with my Time Machine backup, but I didn't. Just needed my machine back.

Tom (... a word to the wise!)

[Tink]

Thanks Tom. Sorry you had the troubles, but really good you were able to get your machine up and running again!