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Prime Mover wrote: I was under the impression that TM backups are handled essentially like clones. Is that not the case?

The thing is that you can't boot from it. IIRC, you'd have to boot from your OS DVD, and then it'll copy all the files from the TM disk.
You'll need to make absolutely sure that TM is set to backup ALL your files and system files as well (you can verify this in TM's preferences.

It's totally doable too, and, IME, it has worked fine (I've recovered my laptop and my girlfriend's system like this with no problem).

The only thing is that I've also had a TM backup error... Only once, though.

You could nuke and reformat your disk and recover it from TM. It should work just fine. Also, I suggest repairing your disk and the permissions with Disk Utility just before your last TM backup, just to be safe.

A new thing that Lion/ML introduced was "recovery disk" which is the ability to make a tiny bootable version of the OS on a jump drive or CD-R. I don't have to use the original install, and a jump drive should be a lot faster.

Yeah, I'll repair disk permissions, I just did the other day during my innitial troubleshooting (trash prefs, repair permissions... haven't zapped PRAM though, maybe I should try that). But I'm guessing that you're concerned about some new permission cropping up that would make a TM backup difficult?

Oh man, all of this makes me so nervous, being in the middle of a project and all. I'm really putting it off (kinda have to, I've been really busy). I'll do it this weekend though.

Prime Mover wrote:That's my concern too. I've noticed that it's sometimes connected to Time Machine backups (every hour). When the TM is running, it's almost always slow, but I think I've experienced it at other times too.

A lot of people, myself included use this shareware (preference pane) to automate TM's backup schedule.
http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html
It's nice to have an hourly backup but the CPU drain is not worth it for me. The scheduler is faithful to the preferences you have set up in TM.

Okay, I've got it. It's definitely Time Machine. I just spent a couple hours away from the network the other day, and edited the same project that was consistently giving me problems (though I noticed it with other projects too), and everything worked smoothly. So I'm pretty convinced that it's TM. I'm not going to backup and reload, I don't think, because fragmentation is not likely the problem. It may be a good thing, and for that, I'll probably get iDefrag down the line. Thanks everyone!

Ccran: Wow, thanks! That will be nice!