My First Time Machine Restore
After failing to get iDefrag to defragment my 500GB hard drive, I tried doing a Time Machine restore to accomplish the same thing. (I wish I had thought of that before spending the $30 on iDefrag.)
First, I made sure that I wasn’t excluding anything from my backups, like my VMWare virtual machines, etc. And then I did two backups, just to be 100% sure that my backups were current.
I booted from my OS X 10.6 DVD and did the restore from my latest backup. I let it run overnight, but it estimated it was going to take about 4.5 hours. This was for about 470GB of data.
Everything seems to be OK. iDefrag’s display shows that my data is 100% defragmented and everything is nicely compacted together. However, the Finder is showing that I now have 14GB more free space on my drive! I realize that Time Machine doesn’t backup logs and caches and other hidden Unix files I probably won’t miss. Also, defragmenting can increase free space… but 14GB!? I’m afraid I’ll find out one day were all that data went, and I won’t be happy.
If anyone has an explanation for this, please contact me or send me message on Twitter (@briantoth), I’d like to know what’s going on.
