time machine ****ed me.

[elurscam]

So my up to date OSX snow leopard MBP was running sluggish, and i decided a fresh installation of OSX would help, since i had never reloaded the OS since its purchase (late 08). I have several backups with time machine. and BEFORE i reloaded i ran time machine and performed a new backup. Then to be paranoid I copied some of my more important files directly to my external just to be safe.

So I do a one pass zero out of my drive and reinstall OSX. I make the mistake of choosing to not restore from backup until later, which does not work for me because my account is protected w/ filevault, which cannot be restored using migration assistant (must be restored prior to new account being made, right after reinstall of OSX). no big deal, I reinstall again, and reload from backup.

many minutes pass, and I login...... TO a maybe the FIRST BACKUP I EVER DID....WTF! obviously i have NO CURRENT DOCUMENTS (BTW, the documents were in my user documents folder, not some other folder structure that i created). I just pulled a marty mcfly and went back in time to 1985.

So I open time machine....LOOK! there is the backup that i did THAT DAY right before my reinstall. ooookkkkkaaayyyyy........ so i click my harddrive in that backup and click restore......

Does this solve my problem....NO, many minutes and over 100,000 supposedly copied files later, I am still back in ****ING 1985... with none of my current ****.

so WTF do i do now, Well I did make my own manual back up,. THANK YOU GOD!. Ok i think, i will just copy those over and make like new....except for a couple problems, I did not backup my music (trusting that time machine would cover that....)

1) backup ****ed me out of all my music that i added(purchased/ripped) to iTunes. I want my **** back. plus what will happen if i try to sync my Ipad with this ****ed up iTunes database. will i lose all my stuff?

2) the restore, broke the appstore, and did not reinstall facetime. I can't redownload facetime WITHOUT APPSTORE. HOW DO I REINSTALL APP STORE WHEN IT WAS PART OF AN UPDATE?? my mac thinks I'm all up to date.

If there was an apple engineer near by me, i would be choking them to death right now out of sheer frustration..

So any help would be greatly appreciated.

-N

 

[heisenberg123]

So my up to date OSX snow leopard MBP was running sluggish, and i decided a fresh installation of OSX would help, since i had never reloaded the OS since its purchase (late 08). I have several backups with time machine. and BEFORE i reloaded i ran time machine and performed a new backup. Then to be paranoid I copied some of my more important files directly to my external just to be safe.

So I do a one pass zero out of my drive and reinstall OSX. I make the mistake of choosing to not restore from backup until later, which does not work for me because my account is protected w/ filevault, which cannot be restored using migration assistant (must be restored prior to new account being made, right after reinstall of OSX). no big deal, I reinstall again, and reload from backup.

many minutes pass, and I login...... TO a maybe the FIRST BACKUP I EVER DID....WTF! obviously i have NO CURRENT DOCUMENTS (BTW, the documents were in my user documents folder, not some other folder structure that i created). I just pulled a marty mcfly and went back in time to 1985.

So I open time machine....LOOK! there is the backup that i did THAT DAY right before my reinstall. ooookkkkkaaayyyyy........ so i click my harddrive in that backup and click restore......

Does this solve my problem....NO, many minutes and over 100,000 supposedly copied files later, I am still back in ****ING 1985... with none of my current ****.

so WTF do i do now, Well I did make my own manual back up,. THANK YOU GOD!. Ok i think, i will just copy those over and make like new....except for a couple problems, I did not backup my music (trusting that time machine would cover that....)

1) backup ****ed me out of all my music that i added(purchased/ripped) to iTunes. I want my **** back. plus what will happen if i try to sync my Ipad with this ****ed up iTunes database. will i lose all my stuff?

2) the restore, broke the appstore, and did not reinstall facetime. I can't redownload facetime WITHOUT APPSTORE. HOW DO I REINSTALL APP STORE WHEN IT WAS PART OF AN UPDATE?? my mac thinks I'm all up to date.

If there was an apple engineer near by me, i would be choking them to death right now out of sheer frustration..

So any help would be greatly appreciated.

-N

you should use Carbon Copy Cloner for backups and restores works flawlessly

 

[r0k]

Here's another vote for CCC. I also use Crashplan. When it comes to backup ONE IS NOT ENOUGH and Time Machine is more a convenience than a backup.

I have lost data 3 times relying on Time Machine. The first time, nothing was really lost because the original data was safe. The second time, my Time Capsule was off at Apple for repair when my daughter's HDD bit the dust. Her data was gone forever. The third time, my wife's Time Machine backup was corrupted and her data would have been gone forever if I hadn't also been running Crashplan on her Mac.

I still use Time Machine, but only as a convenience and never as my only backup.

 

[belvdr]

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but I've restored my machines a couple of times via a reload of TM and never had one error.

 

[r0k]

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but I've restored my machines a couple of times via a reload of TM and never had one error.

Most TM errors are related to backing up over the network. When I back up to a USB or FW drive, I don't have problems. still I'm glad I had the problems before (except the one where my daughter's data was really really gone) because it got me to start using CCC and Crashplan alongside TM.

 

[belvdr]

Most TM errors are related to backing up over the network. When I back up to a USB or FW drive, I don't have problems. still I'm glad I had the problems before (except the one where my daughter's data was really really gone) because it got me to start using CCC and Crashplan alongside TM.

My backups are over wireless even. Still, no issues. Granted, that's one story against others. I just haven't seen this being a widespread problem (not that I've been researching it either).

 

[blueroom]

No problems here with TM running over WiFi.

PS no point zeroing out a drive unless you plan to sell it. Erase is all you need.

 

[r0k]

My backups are over wireless even. Still, no issues. Granted, that's one story against others. I just haven't seen this being a widespread problem (not that I've been researching it either).

It was widespread enough that Apple included it in some of their Leopard patches after I uploaded data to Apple engineering (when requested by level 2 AppleCare support) when I experienced repeated sparsebundle corruption. Look at the release notes for 10.5.x and you'll see several Time Machine issues in there.

It's probably not as widespread recently since those issues were patched so long ago, but I had a recent experience with my wife's machine moving from SL to Lion where she lost everything and if it weren't for Crashplan, we would have had to fall back to a 2 year old version of all her files. It turns out her machine is an older mini with 802.11g so my solution for her backup issue was to run a gigabit wire to her machine. No problems since.

 

[hafr]

Could this be one of the reasons why you in Mountain Lion can use several HDD's to back up to in TM? It alternates between the drives.