TimeMachine FTW!
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Not withstanding the fact that I needed to restore my operating system in the first place--due to an inexplicable and catastrophic failure of the Java installation resulting in segfaults--I was able to restore my entire 100GB system in around 4 hours. For posterity:
- Boot off the OS X System Install DVD--hold down option while the system starts
- Connect the external drive with the TimeMachine backup--in my case a TimeCapsule attached via ethernet
- Select "Restore from TimeMachine backup" in the Utilities menu
- Select the specific backup (by timestamp) from which to restore
- And away you go!
The disk is then automatically erased and a fully bootable system is restored sans temp directories and cache files. It even managed to restore my PostgreSQL databases that were running at the time--which probably says more about PostgreSQL than anything.
The one grumble I do have is that the timestamps in the name of the backups were some non-obvious period relative to the actual date the backup was made. The difference wouldn't have been much of an issue had I simply needed to restore the most recent backup but as it turned out I needed to go back a couple of days in order to get a clean system. Thankfully I got lucky on the second attempt :)
Once I had restored the system I took a look at the backup folders and sure enough there are two timestamps: the one in the folder name, and the created date. The created timestamp was spot on but the one in the folder name--the one presented to you when restoring--was whacky. I honestly didn't spend long enough to calculate if the difference was consistent.
What is really interesting is that I had SuperDuper! on my list of software to start using but it would appear there is little need--at least in my case.
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: A good understanding of algorithms, and the knowledge of when to apply them, is crucial to producing software that not only works correctly, but also performs efficiently.
