As I already mentioned in the previous post, Time Machine has its problems when it comes to restoring a complete system. We have tried full restore on another Mac of the latest available copy and encountered the following issues:
- Virtually all system permissions are incorrect, leading the disk manager to perform repairs for more than half an hour
- Mail has lost all the contents of its inbox and there is no way to recover them unless we restore them from a previous copy of time machine by running it with Mail in the foreground.
The rest of things are fine, even, although it seems strange, being the last copy available for restoration dated yesterday, we have recovered files from today with all its changes.
We have restored the same system on another Mac with the same characteristics using a bootable copy of SuperDuper by performing the following steps:
- Perform full system copy with SuperDuper by making the target disk bootable.
- Once the copy is finished, without touching anything on the computer, do a Smart Update if we have made changes to the system during the copy.
- Restart (the target Mac) holding Alt and select the target SuperDuper disk to boot.
- We start SuperDuper and do a bootable Backup again selecting the internal disk as the destination.
After these steps we have found a Mac identical to the other, all the perfect user data, cookies and passwords of the browsers on your site, all perfect.
Conclusion: For full restores better SuperDuper (or the old migration assistant that comes with Tiger and Leopard) than Time Machine.
Is it necessary that the mac be connected to time capsule by network cable or can it be done by wifi?
Thank you
I have not tried it but I think that if you mount a wi-fi disk with all the privileges the copy should be done the same as on the wired disk. The only bad thing, the speed.