How to do a 'bare metal' restore from Time Machine

Hi there.

I have searched through this forum and WD’s main site and cannot find help on ths rather basic question: If I have a massive failure of my computer (hardware dies, stolen, etc) how to I completely restore my time machine backup that is sitting somewhere (hidden to the user) to a new computer?

I am backing up fine to my WD Live NAS, and I can hop in to Time Machine (from my existing computer) to recover individual files, but I do not know how to do a complete restore if I was forced to recover to a new computer. This is one of those things that is kind of hard to test out until you need to do it!!!

I am guessing that I could boot an OS X Lion computer in Recovery mode and restore from a Time Machine volume and that presumably, the backups for the various computers would be available. Is that correct? I don’t really have a spare, empty computer to try this with, so any feedback would help.  I am mainly concerned with Disaster Recovery, and rarely use Time Machine to recover individual files that I have accidentally deleted, so I would appreciate any description of how to do a bare metal restore, when the Time Machine share is not ‘visible’.

Thanks…

don

Even when the share is not visible for manual transfer it will be accessible from Time Machine on any computer in your network…

I haven’t try a full restore with the CD but I do not see a reason why it should not work.

You might wanna jump into apple forums to see if any one has done a full restore from a network drive. 

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I disagree that WD NAS Time Machine volume is accessible from any other computer on the network.  I backup from my iMac, and from my (MacBook) laptop, I can see the volume, but can’t mount it.  When i invoke TM “Browse Other Time Mchine Disks” from the laptop, I get an empty list.  If I try to mount the backup volume via the finder, I get a Connection Failure.