Ableton Forum

Does it really work perfectly ?

All the livesets working, etc....?

I am just gonna upgrade from 10.6.2 to 10.6.6 and it's time for my first time machine i guess.

I had a full harddrive crash last year and used Time Machine. It was actually really awesome. You don't even need to reinstall the OS. You just fire up your system and boot off of the OSX install disc. Then once you partition that disc, you can really easily restore from Time Machine... there is an option to do that. It took quite a few hours to restore, but once I did, everything was perfect. Nothing was missing, all setting were exactly as I left them, all programs worked just fine, all plugins worked without having to reactivate them... everything was exactly as I had it 35 minutes before my computer crashed. I didn't lose a thing. I now swear by Time Machine and think its probably one of my favorite features of OSX

I've used it for certain files now and again, as well as when I upgraded the HD in my wife's MBP. Works great, never had any issues.

Thanks guys.
I am so paranoid....

I used it last year when I upgraded to to snow leopard. I used it to go back to 10.5.8 after the initial upgrade because the upgrade automatically installed the latest version of OSX which unfortunately there were no supported drivers for my sound card. Had to revert back to pre SL and then selectively choose the version of OSX to upgrade to. Worked awesome. Just double check all your drivers are supported before pulling the trigger

chapelier fou wrote:Does it really work perfectly ?

All the livesets working, etc....?

I am just gonna upgrade from 10.6.2 to 10.6.6 and it's time for my first time machine i guess.

Why do you need to use TM? Just install the update, it doesn't overwrite your files.

Because i m paranoid.

chapelier fou wrote:Because i m paranoid.

I wouldn't really worry too much about upgrading your OS. Apple did a smart thing with OSX: the operating system files are kept completely separately from your user folders. So even in the dramatically remote chance that something screws up when you're upgrading your OS, all of your actual files will be totally fine. In fact, a friend of mine was doing something on his Mac (not upgrading OS, something else, but I'm not sure) and his OS got all messed up. He didn't have his HD backed up, but what he did was take the HD out of his laptop, and plug it into his other machine, and just transferred his Home folder off. Then he completely wiped his Mac's HD and reinstalled the OS. Then he just transferred his Home folder over and everything was completely intact. The moral of the story is, basically don't really worry too much. You'll be fine. You should be backing up to Time Machine anyway, because it's so easy and painless. So do it!

Haha

You'll be fine, just do the update. You wont have to use TM!

Nice.

+1 for flawless success with TM. More than a few times, without exception. It's certainly not a redundant place to find one's computer, and for next time, you might want to consider an additional drive daisy chained off the usb on the TM or a Carbon Copy Cloned version on a separate drive. I definitely empathize with that feeling of uncertainty.
Heck, some people use a TM back-up instead of optimizing their hard-drive in place. It's faster and gets better results. Put more redundancies in place, and you might feel secure enough for that option.

So, this story is why I tell people to buy Apple (yes, it's on topic somewhere toward the end).

A week ago Saturday (day after iPad2 launch), here's the timeline:

8:00 AM: the hard disk on my wife's Macbook Pro died. She was leaving town that morning, so I said I'd take care of it.
9:00 AM: I request a callback from Apple support online.
9:01 AM: Support calls. USA based. English obviously first language.
9:20 AM: We've exhausted all phone-based support possibilities. We set up an appointment at my local Apple store (Domain in Austin) for 1:00 that afternoon.
1:00 PM: At Apple store. Go through a few more tests with the counter geek. He agrees that it's dead, and tells me it will take 20 minutes or so to image a new drive for me. Groovy, I head to Starbucks.
1:30 PM: I come back to the store, and notice the floor geeks setting up ropes.
2:15 PM: I have new iPads for me and my wife. Plus a newly imaged MBP.
3:00 PM: Back home. Run Time Machine on the MBP. Choose the most recent backup (6 AM that morning). 186 gigs to restore. Plug it in and forget about it.
Next Morning: Computer is exactly like it was 2 hours before the crash.

So yeah, Time Machine is a great thing, and it works (which is more than I can say for Norton Ghost). I've had Dell laptops die on me. I've had HP laptops die on me. The customer service experience involved got me to swear off both forever. With Apple, 7 hours elapsed between the crash and the successful resolution. I could have shaved two hours off of that if I hadn't wanted to wait until after lunch for my appointment...

edit: Our setup is a 2 TB hard drive in an external enclosure attached to an Airport Extreme. Its only job is to be the backup for my wife's MBP and my Mini server.

loydb wrote: edit: Our setup is a 2 TB hard drive in an external enclosure attached to an Airport Extreme. Its only job is to be the backup for my wife's MBP and my Mini server.

Same way I do it too. My wife never remembered to plug in her external HD for TM backups, so I just set it up wirelessly. Much easier.

Ah, yes TM, for the most part I agree completely, very useful tool indeed. When you do system recovery from TM though, depending on the size of your recovery, it may take a while. Oh and when you have your system recovered, the initial TM backup will also take forever, since you would want to keep backing up afterward. That would be one of my top wish list items regarding TM from Apple...when the system is recovered by TM, the first backup post recovery would not take so long.

I dont trust time machine. I prefer to clone the drive as u can boot from it and test the integrity