I used my computer backup today

I woke up today to find that my moderately old 2012 Mac Pro server (that I use to host virtual machines and BOINC scientific computing), was dead. Attempting to boot it resulted in the boot folder with a question mark icon being displayed. Which means the boot disk could not be found. A couple of hours of debugging later I concluded the OWC (Other World Computing) PCI-E SSD disk I installed a few years ago was dead. Thankfully I had a SuperDuper! backup of the boot disk. I did the following:

  1. Removed the broken SSD “disk” from its PCI-E slot.

  2. Installed a HDD in an unused drive bay of my old Mac Pro server.

  3. Booted from the SuperDuper! backup disk.

  4. Ran SuperDuper! and selected the option to restore all files to the new HDD in the system.

  5. Rebooted my server.

  6. Did a few software updates since my backup was a month old.

  7. Profit!

Okay, that last step didn’t literally occur. But the backup did save me an immense amount of time and effort. On the order of two person-weeks. So much time that if I had to reinstall all the software on that server from scratch, and configure it, rather than spend an hour restoring from a backup, I might not have done so. This is only the third time in the past four decades that I’ve had to restore from a system backup. But each and every time I was extremely thankful I had a recent backup.