Adventures in Tech

Taking backups with Time Machine on Mac OS X is a breeze: you plug in the backup drive, and wait for the magic to happen. Restoring the backup to a misbehaving laptop though appears to be a different story. I had to go through multiple iterations before I finally got the data back on the laptop. Since my backup setup is not atypical with the exception of an encrypted drive and backups, I was surprised it took that many times to successfully restore the data. Initially I tried restoring the backups by booting the Mac in recovery mode, and using the restore from Time Machine option. The restore started, but after roughly 12 hours it silently failed. For my second attempt I decided to install Yosemite from scratch and use the user migration assistant to recover my data. After progressing for a long time, the restore silently failed as well. My third attempt was a bit more drastic: I wiped out the drive, and attempted to restore the backup from Time Machine. That too failed after pr...

My Macbook Air started to show wear and tear after a couple of years of heavy use. Five of the keys on the keyboard broke and had to be replaced, despite my light touch typing--honestly, and the battery has moved from the warning that it needs service to retaining electric charge for shorter and shorter periods of time, to not holding a charge at all. For my next device I contemplated getting another Macbook Air with the highly enviable 12hr battery life, or switching back to a 15 inch Macbook Pro, and enjoying a more powerful machine, with a retina display and a respectable 8 hours of battery life. The prospect of more screen real-estate, and more processor power was too enticing, so I ended up getting the Macbook Pro despite the weight difference. Since I accumulated 3+ years worth of data and software on the Air, I did not want to repeat the process of reinstalling apps from scratch and searched for an easy way to migrate the data to the new machine.  Most of the online rec...