Advice sought - recovering from HD failure

[gregarnette]

Hello,

I am seeking some advice on how to proceed wtih recovering from THDF - Total Hard Drive Failure. I'm not suing SuperDuper yet, but will be as soon as I get my system working again. This seems like a place where 'backup/restore' issues are discussed.

I'm new to Mac from the Windows world. I have a Macbook and the internal drive failed. The drive has been replaced, the OS re-installed and the latest system updates have been downloaded.

Prior to the HD failure I used Backup 3 to make full and incremental backups to an external FireWire drive. Now that I am faced with what is in essence a full system recovery, I see the error in my ways by using Backup 3 instead of SuperDuper.

My general question is, when restoring, should I re-install the applications from their original downloads, or rely on the Backup 3 program to replace the files on the new disk?

If I restore the Library folder from Backup, do I have to worry about overwriting

I'm not familar enough with the Mac OS as I am with Windows and feeling a little lost at the moment on what my strategy should be. The Apple web site has very little information on using Backup 3 for full system restores.

Thanks for any information...

-- Greg

[dnanian]

As much as I'd like to help you recover from a Backup 3 backup, I just don't know enough about it to be able to assist competently.

Have you tried leaving a message on Apple's discussion boards or calling AppleCare?