A warning for those using or about to install Snow Leopard. I came
across a rather challenging little bug in the Time Machine that’s
part of the Snow Leopard installation DVD…
A few days ago I made a new Time Machine backup of my Leopard-based
MacBook Pro. The drive in the laptop was 320GB. This went very well,
so I then installed Snow Leopard and gave things a good try out.
Unfortunately, Eudora and a few other vital apps weren’t entirely
stable. (FYI, no, Mail ain’t tough enough, Entourage makes my blood
pressure rise, Thunderbird is annoying and alien, and all else is
noddy. There’s a serious Eudora replacement in active development,
but it isn’t quite ready yet.)
So - time to restore my backed-up system using Time Machine, as per
the instructions. Reboot using the Snow Leopard DVD and select Time
Machine Restore from the menu. Pick the Time Machine backup, pick the
destination (what had been backed up just hours earlier), and…
Time Machine claims that there’s not enough room on the target.
There’s no way to override this, so I couldn’t restore. Even when I
caved in and bought a 500GB drive it still claimed there wasn’t
enough room. Finally I booted using a Leopard (not Snow Leopard) DVD,
and Time Machine was happy to restore to either volume, the 320GB or
the 500GB one.
I haven’t verified this using a different system yet, but it was a
pretty straight-forward setup, no oddities or special case aspects to
it. So, if you ever need to restore an entire Time Machine backup,
not just recover some files or folders, you may well need either a
Leopard installer DVD or a future, later-than-10.6.0 system installer
DVD. The current Snow Leopard disc is definitely suspect as far as
the built-in Time Machine restore feature is concerned.
k
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