3
Imagine me showing up at my friend's doorstep with a laptop in several charred pieces, an intact external drive with (phew) Time Machine backups, and a deadline in a few hours. "Quick," I say, "give me your laptop!" I plug the external drive in and have it acting like my own laptop (rest its soul) in a matter of minutes.
Is that possible? Without wiping my friend's laptop, of course. And ideally without a second external drive.
As you know, if you don't do restores you're not really doing backups. So I'd like to try this out to make sure it would play out as in the scene above.
The question is, how, exactly?
PS: Here's a related but more pie-in-sky question:
More robust mac backups: full, distributed backup without sending gigabytes of traffic over the internet
Edited my answer for your most recent edit. – Daniel Beck – 2010-10-30T11:32:21.867
Sorry for the edits to the question. I know that can be annoying but I think the question is much simpler and clearer this way. And thanks so much for all the help with this! – dreeves – 2010-10-30T11:38:45.600
1It's not clearer, it's a whole different question. Twice. Reflected by the now unsuitable title. – Daniel Beck – 2010-10-30T11:50:03.957
This is the one I was trying to ask all along but I obviously did a bad job. Good point about the title; I'll change it. Originally the option of booting from an external drive hadn't occurred to me, which is why I was asking about restoring to a friend's laptop. But the point all along was about how to use a borrowed computer temporarily if yours dies. So I think now the question is strictly more general. – dreeves – 2010-10-30T20:20:02.513
Makes sense. Could we at least provide an answer or is something still unclear? I kind of lost track. – Daniel Beck – 2010-10-30T21:06:55.187