Time machine - cannot restore from a drive that no longer exists

OK, I have not been able to find an answer to this one. (Also posted on the Apple forums).

I had an external FW drive die on me yesterday. No biggie, or so I thought, I back it up with Time Machine. Well, much to my surprise, when I opened TM, the drive was not available in my Finder view to restore from. I thought this was strange, knowing it had been backing up as I check it regularly, and I could see the data if I manually browsed my TM drive.

I tested something to make sure I wasn't going nuts. I unplugged another external drive that I backup with TM, and same thing - could not restore from that drive. Plugged it back in, and wala, there it is in the Time Machine window to restore from.

Am I just doing something wrong here? Why in the heck would Time Machine NOT allow you to restore from a drive that no longer exists? I mean, isn't the whole purpose of a backup so you can restore in the event of a disaster? I would assume, if I plugged in a new drive and named it the same, it would show, and allow me to restore to it, but what if you want to restore somewhere else?

I managed to get around it by simply manually browsing the Time Machine volume, but either this is a serious bug, or a REALLY poorly written piece of software.

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saltyzoo said:

By default external drives are not backed up by time machine. Did you manually turn backup for the drive on?

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Yeah, it's turned on, and I know it has been backed up as the data is there if you manually browse the time machine folder structure.

JayLenochiniMac said:

Why doesn't someone test that? That seems like an easy enough solution.

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Almost forgot about this thread.

To answer your question, as I replaced the drive this week, it KIND of does. It seems that after I replaced the failed drive with a new one, Time Machine then "saw" it again for restore. The problem is, the restore didn't actually work properly. While some of the files restored properly, this was just a test as I had already manually copied my real data back, Time Machine became VERY confused and starting throwing out error messages regarding missing file links, invalid parameters and a few other things.

On top of that, I could not get Time Machine to backup the new drive properly, again, giving a myriad of different error messages. I wound up reformatting my time machine drive, and starting a new backup. Things are working fine now, but this whole thing is rather disturbing.

Me thinks Apple really needs to work on Time Machine a bit if they expect anyone to use it as a real backup solution for real disasters. Not just "oh, I deleted my document yesterday by accident and need to get it back" type of stuff.