Since upgrading to Leopard I’ve been using Time Machine for my backups (especially as my usual backup solution - SuperDuper - isn’t quite ready for Leopard). It truly is a perfect example of “set it and forget it”, and for the last couple months I’ve had it backing up over the network to my Mac Mini (which now has an external drive array attached). The great thing about using Time Machine over a network is that it’s entirely automatic - the backup image mounts, the backup commences (usually in two minutes or so) and it unmounts the image.

Over Christmas vacation I was setting down my laptop when I heard the sickening sound of 7200rpm gashes being cut into the hard drive platters. That was it - in an instant, 70GB of data gone, and my laptop was a paperweight for the rest of the trip. Normally I would have panicked - after all, that was all of my files - photos, music, finances, development, etc - but everything was backed up just before I left. At the same time, I was nervous knowing that my backup drive was all that stood between me and losing all of my data.

As soon as I got back, I picked up a new drive (Seagate 200GB 7200rpm from Tiger Direct’s Naperville outlet) and went to install it. As I started removing the screws, I stripped the head off of one - this is something you do not want to do. They’re some of the tiniest screws I’ve ever seen, and I had no way of getting it out. A trip to MacSpecialist and $150 later, and the screw was out, drive was in, and a new screw in its place.

Finally, the moment of truth. I booted from the Leopard DVD, selected “Restore Entire System”, and... nothing showed up in the list. Even though I’m using a completely supported configuration, I couldn’t perform a network restore.

Once I attached the drive directly, restoring proceeded without a hitch. A couple hours later, I was booting back into my familiar desktop, good as new.

There were a few minor things that Time Machine did not restore 100% properly:

1. •Spotlight - index was not restored and had to be rebuilt; this took about 45 minutes.
   

2. •Mail - indexes had to be rebuilt when I launched Mail; this took about a minute.
   

3. •iTunes - needed to be re-associated with my iPod and reauthorized to my iTunes store account.
   

4. •LaunchServices - All applications are being launched “for the first time”, but at least all of my document associations are intact.
   

5. •Permissions were read-only for the root of the volume, which prevented me from applying a custom icon. Quick chmod and it’s fine.
   

6. •SyncServices - massive problems with SyncServices; constant errors in system.log. This didn’t surprise me, as SyncServices is rather fragile in my experience, and iCal has application-level bugs dealing with it as well (hopefully to be fixed in 10.5.2 nope, still buggy). I ultimately had to reset SyncServices completely with Syncrospector.
   

However, the end result was that my entire system - OS, applications, data, settings, everything of import - was restored and I was back up and running in the time it took to copy the data over. And the automatic nature of Time Machine means I know I will always be covered. There’s no worrying about when I last backed up, or if I missed something - it’s all there, and it all works.