I've created this blog to catalog software ideas, code examples and everything in between. I've been in the industry for over 3 years and have worked on a variety of projects from Identity and Access Management, to Web Application Security, to Java/Ruby application development.

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Time Machine

Posted February 4th, 2009 by Paul Codding

Ever since Time Machine was unveiled in the latest OS X release, I’ve been very impressed with its feature set.  To be honest I’ve only had to use it to restore 2 files on my machine…both of which were critical.  The most important time that I”ve had to fire up the Time Machine was to restore my id_dsa ssh key after accidentally deleting it from Terminal.  I did not want to have to gen a new key pair and go around and change my authorized_keys files on many remote machines…so Time Machine did the trick.

Last week my wife’s MacBook took a turn for the worse.  The hard drive was making the “click of death” sound, so off the NewEgg for a new 120GB HDD.  Four days later the drive arrived at my door, and I was itching to see just how easy it was to restore from Time Machine.  The process was pretty easy…the only thing that I would have to add was that the process of getting your new HDD to show up in the list of drives to restore to wasn’t the most straight forward.  I had to first partition the new drive and then reboot the laptop for it to recognize the new HFS+ partition.  Once that was done, the rest was easy.  I hit the restore button, and when I emerged from my basement an hour or so later it was ready for a reboot.  Once it was rebooted, it was like nothing had ever happened…except for the 2 weeks of lost data because my wife isn’t the most diligent about plugging in her external Time Machine backup drive.  With that in mind I envy those of you with Time Capsules…but I don’t envy the price tag.

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