Time Machine full system restore

Well, I hosed my printing system. At least it appeared that way.

I know – let’s go backwards in time and make like it didn’t happen.

Boot from the Leopard DVD. Tell it we want to restore from a Time Machine backup.
Wait about 90 minutes for the whole thing to restore. So far, so good.

I got the printing working as desired. All the systems can see the shared printers.
That should do it, right? Wrong!

1. I have a leftover swap file on the Time Machine disk – easy to get rid of – delete it.
2. I have a *very* large backup snapshot in the Time Machine – like 55GB – like it is a complete snap of the restored system. You would think that it would know that I restored from snapshot “A” and would simply make a hard link to that…hmmm
3. mail doesn’t work. My nightly cron job that backs up the databases sends mail. I didn’t get it.

Have to fix mail – wound up trying sudo /etc/postfix/post-install create-missing which got me most of the way there. I had to restart to get the mail daemons all “happy” again.

Oh, yes.

iTunes lost window positioning, had to be re-authorized for iTunes Store songs.

Mail.app decided that it had to import all of my mail! Only real problem there was that it had lots of messages marked unread that had actually been read. Not a big deal. It got the 66,000+ messages into the right places.