I just had the least painful workstation restore process EVAR.
I decided to repartition the drive on my mac, and because I had stuff all over the current drive, I figured it’d be a good opportunity to test Time Machine, so I imaged the drive onto a spare disk, did a backup with TM, then repartitioned the disk.
I reinstalled OS X, and as part of the reinstall, it asked “Would you like to copy data from a Time Machine backup?” – I click yes, it grinds away to itself a bit, and then .. done. Everything back the way it was, mail, every single application (apple or otherwise), web, cookies, passwords, etc. Totally. Painless.
Every time I strike some third-party mac application that is annoyingly sucky (Second Life, I’m looking at you) or just totally unavailable (Warhammer Online, I’m looking at you) I strike something like this which reminds me why they rule.
October 12, 2008 at 12:38 pm
For Warhammer Online you can investigate bootcamp.
Mac’s rule, because they can also be PCs.
October 12, 2008 at 7:18 pm
screw bootcamp. 🙂 go for parallels so you can run both OS’s concurrently & simply switch between them.
http://www.parallels.com
October 12, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Yeah, I have a Boot Camp partition specifically for Windows-only games, but rebooting into a completely new environment is a _workaround_, not a solution. And I’ve tried Parallels, Crossover Games, VMWare, etc. These things do not give decent video support for gaming, even Crossover Games.
October 13, 2008 at 5:37 am
I am old skool – I used a command line tool called “dd”.
October 13, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Oh yes, it “supports” it. It works. Win32 dx9 stuff does indeed function under it. However, performance is not stellar. The very best of these virtualised systems is Crossover Games, which has specific tweaks for specific games (that they list). That’ almost acceptable. Almost. But not really.