Today is “Check your smoke alarm backup” day!

This is a reminder to myself and to everyone that backing up your computer is super-duper important.

Yesterday I had a call from my brother in Singapore (he rarely calls, so when he calls, it’s important), and that he mucked up his fonts in the system, and so he did a Time Machine restore of all his System Library files (when he told me this, my voice in my head goes “nooooooooooooooooo”). After restarting, the computer couldn’t find the System library to boot up from, and display a “?” folder. Obviously, what he restores did not go well. I was searching for a quick and easy way to get everything back because it was not easy to debug this through a phone (and the fact it was nearly midnight when he called), and all I could think of was a re-install of everything from scratch.

Luckily I remember that there is a way to do a full restore of the harddrive from Time Machine. (kudos to Apple for making this easy and painless).

I quickly googled and found that you could do a full restore from a Time Machine backup. And so I asked him to do that and messaged me when everything worked (My eyes are falling asleep by then).

I saw his message this morning with a sigh of relief: “It worked! lucky!”.

Luck is nothing to do with this, my brother.

Time for some strong coffee.