My old Mac Book Pro was getting pretty old, and I was due for an update. I made sure the Time Machine backup was up to date and started the restore.

There were just a few surprises:

• The estimate for Time Machine restore was 48 hours. Ouch. So I had to leave the new shiny machine at the office to complete the restore. All in all, a good experience. It was done when I got back. Not sure how long it took since I worked from home yesterday …
• I missed that the MBP-RD (Retina Display) didn’t have an ethernet port. Our wireless is often flaky at the office and so I haven’t depended on it. Bought the Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter right away.
• I had previously upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion on my old MBP and had to reinstall both Mercurial and the Java runtime. Those updates also had to be reapplied after my Time Machine restore. That surprised me. Does Time Machine ignore the OS files? I guess that sort of makes sense (easy to upgrade the software), but it still puzzled me a bit.
• I also had to re-enter my Office for Mac product keys. I haven’t (yet) encountered any other software that required attention.

Anyhow, less than 2 hours later, everything is running again. Pretty cool.