A few weeks ago, my Mac pretty much died. It was my fault. I downloaded an application called Onyx that deletes caches and has many other system maintenance features. I had problems with a newly installed font not showing up in Word and decided to delete the Mac’s font cache. Something must have happened because after rebooting, my Mac almost instantly had a kernel panic and wouldn’t boot.

Panic set it for a moment. I didn’t have any disks to boot from because they were all packed away. But since I had OS X Lion installed, there is a hidden recovery volume that boots up and allows for some system maintenance and reinstalling OS X. Now I was back in business - almost.

This was great! I decided I would wipe my hard drive, reinstall the OS and then restore from Time Machine backup. Choosing install OS X Lion allows for re-downloading it. All I needed was my Apple ID and password that I originally used to purchase OS X Lion. This whole process was painless. Within about an hour, my hard drive was wiped and I was able to boot up again with a fresh copy of Lion. And when prompted, I was able to connect my Time Machine hard drive and restore all my documents and settings.

The only problem I had, though, was that I previously excluded my Applications folder from backing up. Essentially, I had no applications except for the basics. Getting all of the applications downloaded or reinstalled wasn’t that big of a deal. With most applications, I just downloaded it straight from the company’s web site. Once downloaded, it would just run because my license key was already in place. With the rest, I dug up the install DVDs and went from there.

The good news is that I went from a dead Mac in the morning to fully restored by the end of the day.

Word to the wise - don’t exclude the Applications folder from backing up!

OS X Mountain Lion features the same recovery mode.