Is Restoring From Time Machine Flawless?

[jcan]

Hello,

After messing with an installation in my hard drive today, I decided to perform a full restore through Time Machine, so as to be sure that everything would be just as it was before. I therefore put my Startup Disk, and chose to restore from a previous location in time during which everything in my disk was just as I wanted it to be.

After the restore, my first surprise was that my desktop wallpaper had switched to Apple's default: Of course this was something that could be easily corrected, but still, the fact contradicted with my impression that my machine would be just as I had left it.

My second bad surprise was that iTunes didn't run, and asked me to re-install it it. I did so, and thankfully my songs, iPhones apps etc. were still there...

Then, when I tried to run Mail and Spotlight, they both had to rebuild their databases before launching; again, it proved to be a temporary issue, since after doing so they launched correctly.

However, all these issues have made me a bit nervous: Does the full restore of the TM really restore the system flawlessly, or one might encounter nasty surprises? In other words, should I trust my system to be EXACTLY like it was when this backup was made?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

 

[djackmac]

It has its issues sometimes. But for the most part its good and many of the issues can be attributed to user error. For instance, I had issues on my personal machine due to the fact that way back when I created my time machine backup I was running an ibook. Then last year when I refurbished my newer macbook, I loaded my OS and apps then migrated from my ibook time machine backup and it duplicated my applications folder creating another applications (from old mac) folder. This is attributed to my laziness in taking a shortcut and was easily correctable. Since I was trying to restore an image from a different machine, migrating from the other machine or migrating from a .dmg created from the other machines drive, would have been a better course of action. But unless you want to do a create a new disk image of your drive every time you make any kind of significant change and catalog all of these images yourself, along with the large amount of time and backup space you'll need to keep this up, Time Machine is a much easier option and works great most of the time.