Getting ready for work this morning, I walked into my office to find my 2.5 year old daughter mashing on my keyboard with the monitors off. Time out! After a quick check, it looked like no damage had been done. Later though, I tried to launch iCal with Quicksilver, and Quicksilver could not find it.
I looked at my apps folder (which was open apparently when she was mashing the keyboard) and saw that there were three folders with a bunch of jibberish for names. They were apps, but I wasn't sure which ones were which. Enter Time machine!
I tried to restore the whole apps folder, which I knew would take a while, but it told me Applications cannot be restored as it is used by the system. I selected all apps, hit copy, pasted the names into a text file and printed the file, meaning to open Time Machine and go down the list marking things off until I figured out what was missing.
With all of those items selected, I opened Time Machine and selected a backup from early this morning. All of the apps that were the same remained selected, but the ones that were missing -- the renamed ones -- were de-selected. I simply chose the de-selected apps and restored them.
This saved me a bunch of time going down the list and manually comparing the folder in Time Machine to my printed list. Now, off to Home Depot to get a lock for the office door!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090611105241779