I am writing on my blog after decade. But today is a bit more geeky to write.
I had set up a FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) storage array in my office data center. Created an afp (Apple Filing Protocol) share on my NAS (time capsule are expensive). That afp was configure as time capsule mode. So rest of the story is more generic. My TimeMachine is on my NAS and I was quite happy until the disaster.
My mac was crashed due an experiment. Then it was obvious I have to restore it from my TimeMachine and this is my story.
Unfortunately in recovery mode network TimeMachine backup will not appear. I had to manage it anyway. So what I did:
1. On recovery mode opened the terminal (love it). 2. Created a directory TimeMachine to mount my NAS share. For that just did it on Volumes. so did $mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine /Volumes/TimeMachine $ mount -t afp afp://user:password@afpserver.local/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine <<this will mount my the afp share volume. <<you can use your ip instead.It was quite right in step. But unfortunately Restore process was not able to detect my backup volume where I can see my volume is properly mounted. Then found without hdid it can’t be done. Then did:
hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/myBackup.sparsebundleAnd now another story began. My volume can’t be open because of an error. This was most frustrated for me. Then suddenly realize need to reset my FreeNAS. Because that was running for quite a long time. I restarted it and did the step again and this time it was quite perfect. I have restored my MacBook Pro and writing the blog post on it now.
As my backup size was more than 460GB so I use a 1gbps wired connection rather than wifi N. That also took more than 2hours.
If you care for your data you must back it up. TimeMachine is always a good solution for mac users but don’t purchase the expensive storage. Make your own NAS/SAN using OpenSource technologies and use it in your own capacity.
This is the story for today. Will write back here for another geek story on a performance issue of web services.
