Restoring my Home Folder from Time Machine

[gazzared]

Hopefully this in the right place.

I have set up my Mac Pro (2008) with a smallish SSD with the system files, and my Home Folder on another internal hard drive. As of now the hard drive with my home folder keeps disappearing, suggesting it's on its way out.

I followed this guide a few years back.

http://chris.pirillo.com/2008/02/06/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

A couple of times after a reboot, it won't allow me to log into my user account, saying there is an error, but nothing more helpful.

By using the recovery disk in the boot screen, I've ran disk utility and ran first aid on the faulty drive, this appears to get the drive up and working for a short time before the the drive disappears again.

Would the process be:

Replace the faulty drive
Boot into the recovery disk and run disk utility
Format the new hard drive and name it the same as before
Then run Restore from Time Machine Backup, and can you rest a complete drive from a Time Machine backup?

Is their anything else I need to do?

Will there be any broken links or missing files?

Thanks

 

[grahamperrin]

Create a separate administrator account with its home directory not on the failing drive.

If you have (or can borrow) an external enclosure for the disk that will replace the internal disk, then I recommend ditto(1) to copy from the failing drive to the good disk, because ditto almost never gives up; and from personal experience I know that statement to be true.

 

[JohnDS]

I would suggest you format the new drive as Apple Extended Format (Journalled), then use Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com) or SuperDuper ( http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html ) to clone the failing external drive to the new one.

Then, follow the instructions in the article you like earlier to set the home folder on your new drive as the home folder.

 

[gazzared]

I assume from the replies that I would need to log onto another admin account and copy the drive using CCC or similar. I suppose my concern is that the drive will fail while copying. If that happens what will be my options?

 

[grahamperrin]

I suppose my concern is that the drive will fail while copying. If that happens what will be my options?

There are more than two ways of looking at this.

If you use ditto and if part of your original data is in a bad/marginal area of the hard disk, then ditto will repeatedly try to read from that area and if you're lucky it will eventually copy everything from that area.

In Stack Exchange I see things such as How to repeatedly call rsync until files are sucessfully transferred, I no longer know Carbon Copy Cloner well enough to tell whether it can behave similarly in difficult situations.

If you're lucky, repeatedly trying to read from a marginal area of a hard disk will not worsen that area. If you're unlucky, who knows?

There's some deeply technical information at the Gibson Research Corporation (GRC) site.

 

[KALLT]

It is not clear to me whether you have a working Time Machine backup or not. If so, then you can just transfer the home directory from a backup to your newly-setup disk.

 

[gazzared]

Sorry I do have a time machine back up on a time capsule, and checked that it is up to date.

 

[Fishrrman]

This is why it's probably best practice to keep your home folder on your OS-boot drive.

If -SOME OF- the libraries within the home folder are too large to fit (I'm thinking of pictures, movies, music) -- relocate them to another drive. It's easy enough to "re-direct" iTunes or iPhoto or Photos to "look elsewhere" for its library when launched.

But again, best to have the "home folder itself" on the same drive as the boot software.
Things just seem to work better that way...

 

[KALLT]

I agree with Graham that it is probably for the best to create a new user account temporarily so that you can set this up comfortably. From there you set up the disk and then transfer the home directory from your backup with the Time Machine application. To do this, you simply need to right-click on the directory and select the ‘restore to’ option to choose the destination. Time Machine will make sure that the permissions of that directory are maintained.

 

[grahamperrin]

new user account temporarily so that you can set this up comfortably.

Thanks! My original suggestion was quite lazy (I didn't explain why the additional account might help).

 

[gazzared]

Thanks everyone for your help. I think I understand. I do have an admin account set up, but can't quite remember the password, but will figure it out . Now to order a new hard drive.

 

[KALLT]

Thanks everyone for your help. I think I understand. I do have an admin account set up, but can't quite remember the password, but will figure it out . Now to order a new hard drive.

You can always reset a password in single-user mode or from recovery. As long as you have access to the boot disk, this is always an option. You only lose your personal keychain if you cannot remember the password.

 

[JohnDS]

Carbon Copy Cloner can clone the boot drive while you are booted from it, so you don't need a separate admin account. If it were me, I would attach a second USB drive, format it, the reboot in safe mode by holding down the shift key. Then I would turn off wifi, disconnect any ethernet cables and shut down all apps. Then run CCC to copy the old external to the new one.

 

[gazzared]

All sorted save 3 files that were corrupt from the faulty drive. So cloned the faulty drive, renamed it to the original version, and then rebooted with the old drive taken out. Booted up fine, just need to restore the 3 files from my TM backup and it looks great. The beauty of the mac pro is I could do all this from the internal drive bays.

Thanks for all your help.