Thank you for sharing this, I will have to give it a shot and see how well it works!

Well, I haven't tested it with the MediaSmart yet, but I have done restores in this way (for testing) using my Time Capsule and external drives. I actually restored my system this way using the Time Capsule on my MacBook Pro when I upgraded the hard drive to a 7200RPM drive.

It's worked perfectly every time, and there's NO reason it won't work with the MediaSmart.

I'm a little disapointed with one aspect of the MediaSmart and Time Machine though. It seems that no matter how much hard drive space you have on your MediaSmart, you are limited to only being able to create a 1GB size 'disk' per machine. I have three additional hard drives in my MS, all 1.5TB Western Digital Green drives for a total of 5.25 TB (unformatted). Even with all this space, I can only create a 1TB disk. This isn't documented in any of the help files or manuals either. I'm not sure if it's a OSX limitation or not, because the Time Capsule itself maxes out at 1TB as well. We shall see.

It's not a huge deal for me, my current Time Machine backup is only 300GB even on my Mac Pro that has 4 drives in it as well. I only back up my home folder and OSX. Honeslty, I may go back to using Time Machine on one of my internal disks in my Mac Pro just because it's soooo much faster then doing it to a network drive. Worth noting though, using Time Machine with my MS server seems a bit faster than Apple's own Time Capsule.

Over wired Gigabit I haven't noticed any difference in speed of doing backup/restore to the EX485 MediaSmart compared to doing it over a directly connected USB disk.

You won't notice much of a speed difference over USB, but fire wire 800 or an internal or external SATA drive it's light years faster. I was backing up my OSX disk and about 300GB of date in about 4 minutes on an SATA disk (initial backup times from the first backup, incremental ones are much faster). That same backup takes 20 minutes on the MS server and about 23 minutes on my Time Capsule. It also depends on your Mac as well, I'm doing these comparisons on a 2009 Mac Pro 2.26 8 core and a 2008 MBP 2.53 Unibody so the bottleneck is always the interface/drive. Older machines, like Minis without FW 800, are limited to USB or Ethernet since you have one internal drive and you cannot backup to it (and wouldn't want to anyway )

I did get the chance to try this out over the weekend. A friend of mine bought a Mac Mini and I helped him out in setting it up by upgrading the RAM and hard drive for him. As an experiment I did as you suggested and it did work. I did note though that there were a pile of errors after the Migration Assistant ran. I suspect that these errors are probably related to the fact that he had not ever run some applications on the new Mac.

In any event this is definitely good advice, the only thing I would caution users on is that the process is very slow. On a brand new Mac Mini with nothing on it, it took us about 45 minutes to restore OS X from CD (to the new bare HD) and another hour or so to do the Migration Assistant over a wireless network.

Still, it's better than nothing, it would sure be helpful if HP could be troubled to update their crummy documentation and let people know that this option is available for restoring a Mac through the Mediasmart server.

Actually this is not true. Time Machine GUI on desktop is only a front-end to perform _most_often_needed_ restore in a "cool-funny" way. The bottom of this iceberg is huge - a daemon, preference pane, many plug-ins and frameworks. As was highlighted above Migration Assistant has got Time Machine component allowing to restore from Time Machine backups. In the same way the Mac OS X Installation Disk also includes Time Machine component, which again allows to restore from backups, but the _complete_system_restore (that is why initial backup takes so much time). You just need to boot from Installation disk and look in the menu Utilities->Restore... (blah-blah-blah) and . Of course, you won't see the HPMSS backups there now, but it is possible in general (say from local drives, Time Capsule, etc.)

So, as I see, currently the best approach is to use Migration Assistant as was described above.

Have you tried SuperDuper?

_________________
MSS 485 w 2.5 Terabytes, iMac I7, and Macbook Pro 2.4 Mhz.

Why?! I like Time Machine, it perfectly fits for all usual cases. As for "bare system recovery" - being almost nine years with Macs I never had a need in it (knock-knock-knock). Moreover I believe and hope that next MSS update will bring us more tight integration with Time Machine.

So, if you get into a situation where your applications, etc, are hosed, is the best route to simply kick off the migration assistant for Time Machine and recover to a backup from a time when things were working properly?

hmm... I'd say rather no. Migration Assistant is a current replacement of bare system recovery. If you have functional OS, it is better to use TimeMachine itself to go back in time.

I'm not aware of a way for Time Machine to take back the applications folder, etc (when I try to restore the applications folder it complains that it is a special folder that can't be restored in the Time Machine application). If there is a way and I'm missing it let me know, thanks!

Might be we are talking about different things. I've just deleted Chess.app from the Applications folder, cleaned Trash (just in case), entered Time Machine, went back in time and waited while Time Machine loaded content, went to Applications, selected Chess.app, and clicked Restore. Time Machine asked me for authentication and - vuala - Chess.app got back.

Did you expect anything else?

I'm referring to the restoration of entire system folders versus just a single application or file. If your applications folder is trashed and you try to select the applications folder itself from within Time Machine it will not allow you to restore it. This is why I asked if the system got clobbered if the fastest way to recover it would be to do the migration assistant.

Thanks.

Well... you've got me . I never experimented in such a way , because was learned since those dark young Linux ages to avoid doing anything like "rm -fR .*" due to its fatality. If you suppose possibility to delete Applications, System, Library, etc. then you should accept possibility to delete everything including backups - they also just a file system. It's a cruel world - I hope you don't have "drive crash" nightmares.

Well, I've actually been working with UNIX systems since 1996, starting out with System V UNIX. You can crack wise all you want, but there are plenty of situations where installation of new software causes problems across multiple files and folders necessitating the type of restore situation I describe. There are also issues of disk corruption, etc.

You can make your little "cuckoo" smilies all you like, it is something that does happen and any user with a lot of important data and who can't afford a lot of down time on their system is interested in quick ways of doing recovery under those circumstances (without a full reload, etc).

Time Machine appears to be a great tool, but it seems that some extra work must be done to get it to do the types of things power users would expect it to do.