I’m a photographer, so I take a lot of pictures. Space on my iMac’s 160GB drive has been feeling rather cramped recently, so I thought I’d give myself some more room this weekend. I found a great deal on a 320GB SATA drive ($69), so I bought it.

I noticed that the drive only included software to perform a clone-and-restore function for Windows machines, but I thought I remembered seeing the option to restore from a Time Machine backup when I was installing OS X Leopard 10.5 a few months ago, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I turned off the iMac, removed the rear panel, dismounted the existing drive, mounted the new one, plugged it in, put the Mac back together, turned it on and booted from the Leopard install DVD.

Sure enough, there was the option under the Utilities menu of the installer to restore from my Time Machine backup. I chose it, and it found my backups on my external Firewire drive and then presented me with a list of backup points to which I could restore my machine (the most recent of which was a mere 10 minutes before I’d removed the drive).

I chose the most recent backup point, told the utility to restore it to the new drive I’d just installed, and after about 2 hours of chugging data between the two drives, my Mac restarted from the restored data on the new drive.

Snazzy, and damned simple! Time Machine rocks in more ways than one 😀