Restoring a Mac from Time Machine Backups, Part 2

As I described in Part 1, I fried my work 17" MacBook Pro laptop (I guess splashing coffee onto a computer is not good for it). My work gave me a new 17" laptop, and fortunately I had complete Time Machine backups of my old computer. This blog post will go through the steps of restoring the backup onto the new computer. Here are the 3 top-level steps:

• Prerequisites and Preparation
• Installing Mountain Lion and Restoring the Backup
• Post-Installation

Prerequisites and Preparation

My situation was somewhat complicated by a couple of facts, the first being that the new computer was running Snow Leopard, but my old computer (and therefore the backups) was running Mountain Lion. So I was going to have to first upgrade the system to Mountain Lion, and then apply my backups.

New computers come with a hidden recovery partition that you can boot from, and then install. Since this computer was running Snow Leopard I didn't have a recovery partition. I should have been able to just download Mountain Lion from the App Store, but a second complication was that I wasn't able to log into the computer. So the first step was to use a second computer to get a copy of Mountain Lion and install it on a bootable USB drive. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) wrote an excellent post on this process, so rather than try to write my own, feeble version, go read that article, then come back here for the rest of the steps.

Installing Mountain Lion and Restoring the Backup

1. Plug the USB drive created above into the new computer.
2. Start the computer, and immediately press the alt/option key until a list of boot devices is displayed. Select the USB drive.
3. You will see the OS X Utilities screen. Pick Reinstall OS X and click Continue.
4. Follow the prompts to install OS X Mountain Lion.
5. There were a number of steps during the installation. The first was the preparation for installation and took approximately 7 minutes. It then rebooted and began the actual installation, which took less than 15 minutes. Finally I received the Installation Successful message and it again rebooted.
6. At this point I had a good Mountain Lion install (just like what you would have buying a brand new computer). Now I needed to restore my backup. I removed the USB Recovery stick and connected my external disk that contained my Time Machine backups. Once the computer came up I answered the Welcome/Registration, Keyboard and Wi-Fi network questions. I was then given the Transfer Information to This Mac prompt. I chose From Another Disk and clicked Continue. I then chose the Time Machine disk as the Source and clicked Continue. On the next screen (Transfer Your Information), I kept all 4 choices selected (Users, Applications, Settings, Other files and folders), and clicked Continue. It took about 1 hour and 45 minutes to restore 166GB of data. Once the restoration was complete I had to answer a couple last questions and then the process was complete!

Post-Installation

I did have to re-enable a number of functions, including my iMessage credentials. I also had to reconfigure Dropbox and Google Drive. As a developer, I use Java quite a bit and discovered that Java had not been restored. This was easily resolved; the first time I typed java from a Terminal window it prompted me to install it.

At work we maintain all our source code in Version Control Systems (VCS) like Subversion and CVS. All I had to do was start Eclipse and re-check out my projects to get the latest code.