Use Time Machine on a Mac to restore

A Mac takes care of system backup and restore much better than a Windows PC. The Time Machine software on a Mac not only stores current data, it can maintain previous versions of files and folders along with the whole operating system. In the event of any failure or deletion, it only takes a few seconds to recover old files.

I have an iMac with a 1TB Hard drive and a Macbook Pro with a 500GB drive and a 2TB external hard drive. The external drive has Time Machine copies of both these Mac. It’s set to store previous versions of all files till the time the drive becomes full, thereafter automatically overwrite the oldest versions of files.

In the event of a complete hard drive failure, all I’ll need to do it replace the hard drive of the system, plugin my external hard drive and boot the system from the Mac OS X boot DVD. This DVD allows me to choose that I want to restore my system:

It finds my Time Machine backup drive and I can restore to the latest backup or I can even use this feature to move my system back a few days by choosing an older copy of backup.

I can also use this feature to copy my entire hard drive content from one machine to another, including the Mac OS X operating system, all my applications, settings and files.