Lost it all

[ron7624]

I bought a 1tb usb 3.0 drive for time machine backups. Backed up my MBA, my wife's Mac Mini and my Mac Mini.
I lost the ability to connect to wifi on my Mac Mini and after trying to fix the problem without success, I figured well just do a restore.
I did.
The restore somehow took my wifes setup and put it on my machine. When I looked on the 1tb drive I saw that my backup was listed but it wasn't used.
Don't believe them when they say that Yosemite can use the same hard drive for all your machines and time machine will keep things separate. Luckily, its a pretty new machine and I did save all created info to a thumb drive. But what a pain.
I'm putting a fresh copy of Yosemite on now.. only 2 hours and 48 minutes to go.

 

[Fishrrman]

Can't help you this time, but, NEXT time...

.... try using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create bootable cloned backups.

If you do this, I predict if you ever get into an "I need to restore" situation again, things will go much easier...

 

[old-wiz]

And don't just backup to a single physical drive - if it dies your backups die with it.

I keep multiple physical drives for backup and rotate them and keep one copy locked up.

 

[jbarley]

The restore somehow took my wifes setup and put it on my machine.

Having done many successful TM backups and restores over the years I'd venture a guess that during the restore process, when prompted for what to restore that the wrong volume was selected, not really a Yosemite issue.

And the point in the previous post about having multiple backups, is good advice.

 

[ron7624]

Sigh. I guess the new factor was my biggest problem. The machine is new... the time machine backup is recent, the drive to store the backup is new and the knowledge is limited. lol
But I'm learning. The up side is that there wasn't much to lose since I saved all of my created files to a thumb drive before trying to fix the wifi issue.
I will take all of your advice and put it to good use.
I downloaded another fresh copy of Yosemite, and to my surprise it came up to my wife's setup again with no back up drives attached, because I had not thoroughly cleaned the machine before reinstalling. So, I added myself as an admin and deleted her account from my machine. I went into Sharing and renamed the machine to my original computer name . Anyway, I'm up and running again as me. Lesson learned.
Thanks everyone for the advice.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

Lost it all

And don't just backup to a single physical drive - if it dies your backups die with it.



I keep multiple physical drives for backup and rotate them and keep one copy locked up.

+1

I use a 1TB RAID1 external eSATA enclosure using Carbon Cloner Copy as my main backup scheme for my 1TB OS SSD icm a 1TB RAID0 internal SATA for fast boot if needed.

My Time Machine backup goes to a Syno DS1812+ NAS as well my internal SATA 4TB RAID0 working/scratch disk that holds all my photo and video files.

Cheers