Why it’s a good idea to backup everything
September 12th, 2008by tim
The hard drive on my MacMini died the other night. Crashes like this are always devastating in one way or another, but luckily I was using Apple’s TimeMachine to do frequent backups for me. I spent $64 on a new larger hard drive and went about installing. Opening a MacMini involves some patience, some tenacity and a putty knife or two. Of course I wasn’t able to locate any of my putty knives, but luckily I had a large, thin sheet of brass in my desk drawer (doesn’t everybody) that seemed like a reasonable surrogate. Brass sheet in hand, I cracked open the case and quickly disassembled the internals to reveal the hard drive.
My wife happened to be out running errands near ENU Inc. where I buy computer parts, so I called ahead and had them hold one at the desk for her. ENU was just as she expected it to be… full of middle aged “geeky looking” men and not a single whiff of estrogen to be found.
I installed the new hard drive, assembled the machine, put in my Leopard install DVD, hit the power button and waited for something to boot. Eventually the DVD booted and greeted me in the flashy, shiny way that Apple products greet a user. I clicked around for a bit and eventually came to a point where I could access menus, and that’s where I found Utilities > Restore System from Backup. Beauty, do that! I selected the backup drive, and a destination drive, and clicked Restore. I woke up the next morning to find my old screensaver purring happily along just as I left it before the crash. I wiggled the mouse to wake things up and saw a lot of “?” icons in the Dock bar. (And now the answer to the title question) It hit me…I explicitly don’t backup Applications to save backup disk space! Bugger! There wasn’t even an Applications directory on the system. The Restore System From Backup did just what it said and nothing else.
I had to run the installer DVD again, erase the disk and start over. This time I didn’t restore from the backup, but instead ran a fresh install. Eventually the install utility asked me if I would like to copy over settings from a backup disk, and I did. I still have to go through the task of re-installing all of the applications that weren’t backed up. My data is all safe and restored, and that’s what’s important, but I made things more difficult for myself because I was stingy with disk space. Silly.