The Time Machine team deserves a raise
It began innocently, my iMac seemed to be slowing down some. Lots of beachballs. As an old Windows user my instinct was to reboot. Uh-oh. Now it wouldn’t boot at all.
Having learned the trick of terminal mode and fsck -fy from episode 81 of Macbreak Weekly. fsck just informed that I had invalid nodes. Penicillin-joke.
But! I have a Time Machine backup.
So I inserted my Leopard disc. Chose restore from Time Machine. Now, this takes a long damn time. First it takes about 20 minutes to calculate the required space, then the copying took 5 minutes. I was suspicious.
Now my machine wouldn’t even show me the Apple logo. Panic began to set in. However, I had a plethora of backups to choose from so I redid the entire process and chose one earlier.
The restoring now took about 2 hours, but now my entire system was restored as it was a couple of hours before. Every application still works (although they think I’m launching them for the first time), except for Linkinus which now just display a blank window. But redownloading will probably fix that.
So in my humble opinion, the entire Time Machine time at Apple deserves a raise and a big pat on the back.