How to Restore your Mac With a Time Machine Backup

With the release of OS X Leopard (10.5+), Apple's Time Machine has become an indispensable backup system for most who use it. Not only can you retrieve old and accidentally deleted documents, you can restore your entire system if it happens to somehow get corrupted or stop working, as they sometimes do. That is, of course, if you back up regularly. And with Time Machine it's almost a no-brainer.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Mac running OS 10.5.5+
• External hard drive
• Mac OS X Install DVD that came with your Mac

1. 1

   Connect your external hard drive to your Apple computer and make sure it's on. Some drives have a switch.

2. 2

   Turn on the computer.

3. 3

   Insert the Mac OS X Install disk that came with your Mac in your optical (aka DVD) drive, then shut down the computer.

4. 4

   Restart the computer and hold down the "C" key to boot from the DVD.

5. 5

   Select your language and hit "Continue."

6. 6

   Select "Utilities" > "Restore System from Backup" from the top menu.

7. 7

   Click on the Time Machine option in the window that asks you to select a backup source.

8. 8

   Hit the "Continue" button.

9. 9

   Click on the most recent (or the date of the backup you'd like to restore from) snapshot in the window that asks you to select a backup. This list will show all of your Time Machine snapshots.

10. 10

    Click the button labeled "Continue."

11. 11

    Select the disk you want to restore. In most cases, there will only be one disk available here, which will be your Mac's hard drive.

12. 12

    Click "Restore." This may take a while depending on how big the backup is. Most of the time the estimated time is longer than the actual time it takes to restore your backup.

Tips & Warnings

• Every time you do a system update, make sure to check that your Time Machine backups work properly beforehand and do a quick backup before your upgrade, just in case something happens.