I recently had a very hard-to-diagnose fault (initial symptom was boot volume refusing to mount, but the eventual cause turned out to be bad RAM).
In the course of attempting to diagnose this with the help of both Applecare and an Apple Store, we replaced the drive and had to try first a Restore then a Migration from the Time Capsule backup. I assumed as my TM backup would be 100% up-to-date, the process would be painless; I was wrong.
First, doing any recovery of 700Gb of data via Ethernet is slow: five or six hours a time. When the Restore failed (some system file corrupted during the original crash and then backed-up, we presume), AppleCare advised me to create an account with a different name before the Migration else things can apparently get confused.
However, this created a bunch of issues with permissions. In short, the process was something of a nightmare.
So, the lesson I've learned is that a Time Machine backup - especially one on a Time Capsule - is fantastic for retrieving a few accidentally-deleted or corrupted files, but is not a great solution when you need to rebuild an entire machine.
I've now bought Carbon Copy Cloner and will be creating bootable clones of both drives (I have two internal drives) on an external USB drive, updating these weekly.
The other lesson which I'd heartily recommend to anyone who travels and has a machine with two drives: put a clean install of OSX on the second drive. Then in the worst-case of the boot volume not allowing you to boot up, you can boot from the second drive and at least have a usable vanilla machine until you can get back to your clones.
In the course of attempting to diagnose this with the help of both Applecare and an Apple Store, we replaced the drive and had to try first a Restore then a Migration from the Time Capsule backup. I assumed as my TM backup would be 100% up-to-date, the process would be painless; I was wrong.
First, doing any recovery of 700Gb of data via Ethernet is slow: five or six hours a time. When the Restore failed (some system file corrupted during the original crash and then backed-up, we presume), AppleCare advised me to create an account with a different name before the Migration else things can apparently get confused.
However, this created a bunch of issues with permissions. In short, the process was something of a nightmare.
So, the lesson I've learned is that a Time Machine backup - especially one on a Time Capsule - is fantastic for retrieving a few accidentally-deleted or corrupted files, but is not a great solution when you need to rebuild an entire machine.
I've now bought Carbon Copy Cloner and will be creating bootable clones of both drives (I have two internal drives) on an external USB drive, updating these weekly.
The other lesson which I'd heartily recommend to anyone who travels and has a machine with two drives: put a clean install of OSX on the second drive. Then in the worst-case of the boot volume not allowing you to boot up, you can boot from the second drive and at least have a usable vanilla machine until you can get back to your clones.