How to restore from time capsule

I need to check an external drive (time capsule) for recent backups.  How do I do this?

Read Q14-18 in Pondini.. the grand poohbah of Time Machine.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Similar Messages

  • Safari history - how to restore from Time Capsule?

    Background...
    I couldn't open Safari today (beachballing with no window opening whatsoever), presumed the "com.apple.Safari.plist" file was corrupted so deleted it from "~/Library/Preferences", and restored a copy using Time Machine from my Time Capsule from yesterday before I had the issue. Safari settings from yesterday restored and working.
    However...
    My Safari History going back 2 years has deleted to just one month ago! How can I restore these from a previous Time Capsule backup? Is it just "History.plist" file from "~/Library/Safari" that needs to be restored, or also the one titled "HistoryIndex.sk" in the same location, and/or any others?
    Also, do I need to restart machine after restoring all files needed, or should the history show immediately after just relaunching Safari?
    Note: I tried doing the "History.plist" one only, yet still just get the one month of history showing. This is really urgent as I have sites in my 2 year browsing history I need to get to again!
    Help very very gratefully received :-\

    jimthing wrote:
    Though I am still finding that with circa 2 years worth of history, they may be starting to delete from the back-end after a while; so I presume there may be a theoretical max amount of sites and/or dates Safari will keep in there regardless of setting "Manually" for history deletion.
    I doubt there's a maximum size specific to the History plist, but that (or corruption of it) would be the only limitation. And yes, plists do get corrupted with some frequency.
    And I don't know, either, what would happen if the plist got to a maximum; whether you'd get a message, or it would drop the oldest entries.
    That must be a huge+ file after 2 years! It's a bit surprising that it hasn't gotten corrupted before.
    If your browsing history is that important, I'd suggest finding some other way to keep it that long, such as bookmarking the critical sites. That would take much less room (and be less subject to corruption) than the history of every site you've ever visited, every time.
    And/or, there might be a 3rd-party app that would help. I don't know of any, but it might be worthwhile to look for one.

  • How to restore from Time Capsule to bare hard drive

    This is more for information, than a question, but I really hope that it helps someone else out facing the same challenge.
    Scenario:
    1 complete recent backup on Time Capsule
    2 failed hard drive on Mac
    3 no startup or OS disk
    [My teenage daughter was distraught, as her much loved and much abused MacBook Pro died completely on a college tour; quick diagnosis confirmed that the hard drive was completely toast. And with it, she believed, all of her work this summer on her college applications.
    That was the bad news. Now for the good news. Unbeknownst to her, I had configured her machine to automatically backup to the Time Capsule on the home network.
    Now the problem. We just moved home. No OS disks. No install disks. And I discovered that she hadn't told me that the optical disk drive was also toast. So no way to get a disk in, in any case.
    So I have a backup, and a new hard drive to go into the dead Mac, and (fortunately) a good Mac (actually several). But all of the guides assume that you have some way to get the zombie Mac to boot.]
    Solution:
    1 figure out spec for new hard drive, find one, buy it and install new hard drive in dead Mac (making it a zombie Mac - it moves but it has no real brains) http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA161/en_US/MacBook_13inch_HardDrive_DIY .pdf and http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2010+Hard+Drive+Repl acement/4305/1
    2 mount hard drive as FireWire disk in Target mode by using ⌘T to any good Mac
    3 download Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/
    4 start the process of cloning, which involves creating a (hidden) Recovery HD partition http://help.bombich.com/kb/advanced-strategies/the-disk-center#recovery_hd
    5 do NOT proceed to clone the 'good Mac', ejecting the formerly dead Mac, which was a zombie Mac, and now has a brain again, and shut it down
    6 connect the now undead Mac to the Time Capsule
    7 boot the now undead Mac, and restore as usual from the Time Capsule http://pondini.org/TM/14.html
    [... and thereby obtain many many good father points]

    Read Q14-18 in Pondini.. the grand poohbah of Time Machine.
    http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

  • Restore from Time Capsule after Hard Drive Crash

    The HD on my iMac crashed Christmas Day. I have been running backups on Time Machine to a Time Capsule since I purchased the iMac (and also backing up a MacBook Air), but never had any occasion to see if it worked.
    I yesterday got the computer back with a new HD installed. When I tried to do the restore from Time Capsule from the Setup Assistant which ran on start up, I could not get past the initial screen. It kept hanging up on "Opening Time Capsule," and then on one occasion it found only the MacBook Air back up volume.
    After some research here, I tried running the utility after booting from my Snow Leopard disk. This time, it immediately found the backups from both computers, but hung up on opening the iMac backup.
    After more research, I ran the disk utility and repaired the HD on the iMac. It finally worked -- I woke up to a "Restore Complete" message (it started around 10:00 pm last night). The iMac started up without a hitch to the way it looked Christmas morning. The only problem I have noticed is that my most recent events in iPhoto are empty. The thumbnails are there, but no pictures. I tried to rebuild the library using iPhoto Library Manager, but no luck. Any ideas?
    The other thing I noticed is that I had to reauthorize the computer for my iTunes purchases. Will Apple fix that so it doesn't chew up my last remaining authorization?

    think about the speed of wifi here
    speed at 802.11n = a theoretical 540Mbps (less in real world scenarios)
    Mbps = Mega bits per second
    MBps - Mega bytes per second
    8 bits = 1 byte
    8 mega bits = 1 mega byte
    How long would it take you to download a 1 gig file from the internet wired into your modem? About 10-20 min? And that is taking into account that the info is being uploaded hardwire. Now imagine that same file over wireless in your home being upload by the Airport card in your computer. People over look upload speed when considering these things. The wireless upload speed of your Airport card is what is limiting this. Just a limitation of the technology, not a fault of Apple just stating the numbers here.

  • Trying to restore from time capsule to nes hard drive, keeps looking for disks ! Can you help

    ccan't restore from time capsule to new hard drive, after changing to new HD, after calculating required space to restore it keeps looking for disks! Have have put original OS X  install disk 1 in it won't Eject , any help

    The very best way to do this is with ethernet to the existing router. Put the TC in bridge mode manually.
    Then plug it in to existing router.. we recommend LAN router to WAN on the TC but even that is not 100% necessary.
    If you want to link by wireless, to a non-apple router that is bad.. recommend strongly against it. Join a wireless network is super slow.
    If you have a desktop Mac you can plug it directly into the Mac by ethernet.
    But we need to know how the Mac is connected to internet.
    I have given some info on one layout here.
    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4817218?tstart=30
    If you end up relying on an old TC. And any of the models from Gen1-3.. and increasingly Gen4 have all reached EOL.. they can die suddenly and either take your files with them or be hard to recover. Also a TC is slow cf a USB external drive even, which is more reliable. Considering a 2TB is <$100 I would be careful using an old TC simply because you got it free.

  • Full Restore from Time Capsule after hard drive failure

    Authorized agent replaced hard drive after it failed. Installed 10.5.5 and currently attempting to do a full restore from Time Capsule - progress is slow and in question after 22 hours. The backup size approx. 100 gb.
    Screen reads "Transferring Information" at the top, progress bar is moving, and bottom of the screen reads "Looking for applications and documents to transfer" and hasn't changed for 22 hours.
    Is this normal? how long should 100 gb take to restore?

    think about the speed of wifi here
    speed at 802.11n = a theoretical 540Mbps (less in real world scenarios)
    Mbps = Mega bits per second
    MBps - Mega bytes per second
    8 bits = 1 byte
    8 mega bits = 1 mega byte
    How long would it take you to download a 1 gig file from the internet wired into your modem? About 10-20 min? And that is taking into account that the info is being uploaded hardwire. Now imagine that same file over wireless in your home being upload by the Airport card in your computer. People over look upload speed when considering these things. The wireless upload speed of your Airport card is what is limiting this. Just a limitation of the technology, not a fault of Apple just stating the numbers here.

  • Restore from Time Capsule problem

    I had to restore my system from my Time Capsule but it is not working.
    Help needed.
    Macbook Pro 15/2.2GHz/2x1G/160GB/SD/MDM
    Installed OS X 10.6.7 update 5/7/11 but after that many apps started to crash on launch.
    Attempoed restore from Time Capsule using a Time Machine backup from prior to the update so as to rollback the OS to 10.6.6.
    The restore failed (screen never got beyond the Apple Screen and the spinning gear aftewr waiting six hours).
    So I wiped the harddrive with a high degree of security and then repeated the restore with an even older version of 10.6.6 but the screen still hangs at the Apple screen with the spinning gear.
    I will leave it to run over night to see what happens, but I suspect it will still be this way in the morning.
    What do I do next?
    The drive was checked out as OK by Disk Utility First Aid.  Is there another utility I should use to check the laptop HD?
    Steven Locke

    You can erase & install the system again, and when finished migrate your data within the setup assistant from the backup volume. With this method the system files are installed fresh from disc and not transferred from the backup.

  • After trying to restore from time capsule, I get the following message when I try to access the folder "data." The folder "Data" can't be opened because you don't have permission to see its contents.  Any ideas?

    after trying to restore from time capsule, I get the following message when I try to access the folder "data": "The folder “Data” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents."  Any ideas?

    Are you restoring from a TM backup??
    Check the methods Pondini outlines to do restore.
    Q14-17
    http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

  • How to restore from Time Machine WITHOUT install discs using a second Mac

    It's a question that is asked repeatedly all over the web by Mac users like me that bought in to Time Machine (TM) on the assumption that if their computer died one day it would be a piece of cake to restore from it, only for that day to come and then to be told "ahh, okay the first thing is to get your computers install discs..." (loud crashing sound of world falling around ears).
    I've never been able to afford a new Mac and both of my machines were bought second-hand. Neither came with Leopard (both have Tiger and have been upgraded to Leopard via the net). This was never supposed to be a problem as I've been backing up with TM. However it appears that Tiger discs are as much use as an inflatable dart board when it comes to using TM. So I've been faced with the possibility of having to spend £130 (about two hundred Pres Sheets, Yankees) on the Leopard install discs just so that I can have the option of restoring from TM. Bonkers.
    However after much nashing of teeth, a very long weekend learning all sorts of things about 'Target Mode', 'Single User Mode', 'Verbose Mode', 'Open Source 9' etc the following solution has worked without the need to go out and buy those over-priced discs...
    What you will need:
    1 broken Mac requiring restoration
    1 second donor Mac running Leopard (or Snow Leopard so long as the broken Mac can run it)
    1 firewire cable with the correct fitting at either end to attach both Macs together
    1 Time Machine backup
    Note: The following is for when you have given up trying to boot from your hard drive. In my case I couldn't boot in to Safe Mode etc. so was forced to format my drive and re-import everything. If you've read this far I'm assuming your at the same point as well and have tried everything else that's out there first.
    Also - both my Macs are Power PC's so can't run Snow Leopard, so I can't say 100% this will work with SL (Intel) machines. From what I've read Snow Leopard will work with this procedure too, but if you've found differently please feel free to add your experiences below...
    STEP ONE: Format the corrupt Hard Drive or replace with a fresh HDD
    *Link the two computers with a firewire.
    *If you're replacing your HDD, remove your corrupted hard drive from the 'broken' machine and insert a new one.
    *Power up the broken Mac whilst holding down the 'T' key. This will start it up in Target Mode and you'll get a nice firewire symbol floating around that machine's screen.
    *Power up the second 'healthy' Mac. This will be our 'donor' machine. When it starts up after a few seconds you will see the hard drive of the broken Mac appear on the donor Mac's desktop.
    *Using your donor Mac's 'Disc Utility', format the broken Mac's hard drive (now's the time to partition it etc. if you want to).
    STEP TWO: Clone your donor Mac
    Your broken Mac is no longer broken and now needs a new OS. But you don't have the discs, right? Well get this... you can clone your donor mac on to your machine, even if they are totally different i.e. a laptop on to a tower.
    *Again using Disc Utility, click on your donor Mac's hard drive. The restore tab appears as an option.
    *Click on restore and drag the donor Mac's hard drive that contains the operating system in to the Source box.
    *Drag the newly formatted hard drive on the broken Mac in to the Destination box.
    *Click restore. Your donor Mac's hard drive will now be 'cloned' on to your no-longer-broken Mac. Once this is done, eject the first Mac's hard drive from your donor Mac's desktop. You no longer need the donor Mac.
    Ta daa! Your machine now starts up happy and smily again. Time to restore all that stuff that's been sat on your Time Machine drive...
    STEP 3: Restore from Time Machine using Migration Assistant
    This is the really clever part that prompted me to write this piece in the first place. Time Machine IS accessible without those Leopard install discs you don't have. You need to use something called 'Migration Assistant'.
    *Start up your machine as normal and you'll see it is an exact clone of the donor machine. Weird huh?
    *Attach your Time Machine hard drive. It will show up as an icon on the desktop and because of it's size, you'll be asked if you want to use it as a Time Machine backup. Err, NO YOU DON'T! Click 'cancel'.
    *Open Migration Assistant (if you can't find it just type it in to Finder and click). There are three options, the middle one being to restore from TM or another disc. Yup, you want that one.
    *Migration Assistant will now ask you what you want to restore in stages, firstly User Accounts, then folders, Apps etc. It will even import internet settings
    And that's you done. Let Migration Assistant do it's thang... altogether I had about 140gb to restore, so it wasn't exactly speedy. This wasn't helped by the fact that my TM hard drive is connected via USB (yes, I know). Just leave it alone and it'll whirr happily away...
    Before I go - you don't have an option of when to restore from, and will restore from the last Time Machine save. At least then you should be able to access TM and go 'backwards' if you need to.
    Also - for a Mac expert, the above will be up there with 'Spot Goes To The Farm' in terms of complexity. However, for the rest of us the above is only available in fragments all over the net. By far the most common response to 'how do I restore from Time Machine without install discs' is 'you can't'. If I'd found the above information in one place I could have saved a lot of hair pulling and swearing over the last couple of days, so forgive me for sharing this workaround with the rest of the world. Meanwhile your expertise will come in very handy for the inevitable questions that will get posted below, so please feel free to help those people that won't be sure if this solution is the right one for them. I'm no expert, I just want to help people that were stuck in the same situation (and looking at the web, there's a LOT of them).
    Hope this is of use to someone, thanks and *good luck*!

    Most maintenance and repair, restore and install procedures require the use
    of the correct OS X install DVD; be it an original machine-specific restore/install
    disc set or a later retail non-specific general install disc set.
    By having an unsupported system, perhaps installed via an illegal download or
    other file-sharing scheme, where no retail official discs are involved and the
    initial upgrade was done by other means outside of the License Agreements,
    you are asking us to discuss a matter of illegal installation and use of a product.
    There are no legal complete OS X system download upgrades online; only bits
    that are update segments to a retail or as-shipped machine's original OS X install.
    +{Or an installation where a previous owner had correct retail upgrade discs, &+
    +chose to not include them with the re-sale of the computer it was installed in.}+
    However, to answer the initial question. To get and use an externally enclosed
    hard drive in suitable boot-capable housing, and get a free-running Clone
    Utility (download online; often a donation-ware product, runs free) you can
    make a bootable backup of everything in your computer to an external HDD.
    This is the way to make a complete backup to restore all functions to the computer.
    The Time Machine has some limits, in that it can restore only that which it saves.
    It does not make a bootable clone of your entire computer system with apps and
    your files, to an external drive device. A clone can. And some of the clone utility's
    settings can also backup changes to an external drive's system; if that other drive
    is attached to the computer correctly.
    Carbon Copy Cloner, from Bombich Software; and also SuperDuper, another of
    the most known software names you can download and use to clone boot-capable
    system backups of your computer's hard disk drive contents, are often cited.
    However you resolve the matter of the running OS X system in your computer,
    derived from what appears to be questionable means, is part of the initial issue.
    Since you do need to be able to fix an existing installation by unmounting the
    computer's hard disk drive and run the computer from the other (install disc or
    system clone) while it is Unmounted; and use the correct Disk Utility version to
    help diagnose and perhaps be able to fix it. You can't use a Tiger version Disk
    Utility to fix a Leopard installation, and so on.
    So, the situation and replies as far as they can go (since the matter does
    constitute an illegal system, if it was arrived at without correct discs) is a
    limited one. And file sharing of copied Mac OS X (and other) software is
    also considered illegal.
    And, one way to get odd malware and unusual stuff, is to get an unauthorized
    system upgrade from an illegal source online. You never know what's inside it.
    The other reply was not a personal attack; the matter is of legal status and as
    you have a product with a questionable system, the answer is to correct it.
    And if you want to save everything in your computer, make a clone to a suitable
    externally enclosed self-powered boot capable hard disk drive. With older PPC
    Macs, that would best be to one with FireWire and the Oxford-type control chips.
    However that works out...
    Good luck & happy computing!

  • How to backup from Time Capsule to external HD?

    How to set up files backup from Time Capsule to external HD?
    Here is configuration: MacBook + MacAir + Time Capsule (which I use as a storage) + 2Tb WD MyPassport (USB connected to TimeCapsule)
    I keep files like photos on TimeCapsule to be available by WiFi and I want to set up my Time Machine to backup picture folder from TimeCapsule to MyPassport HD.

    Time Machine can't back up a network volume. You'll have to use third-party software. I don't have a specific recommendation. There is no efficient way at all to back up a Time Capsule, which is why it should only be used as a backup destination, not as a general-purpose file server.

  • Restore from Time Capsule using Migration Assistant

    When I try to restore my backup from Time Capsule using Migration Assistant it cannot find any backups on Time Capsule HDD.
    Time Capsule works just fine, using TC Application I can restore single files, there is also XXXXXX.sparsebundle file on Time Capsule HDD which I can mount with no problem and see all of my backups.
    Where is the problem?

    Hi,
    I just ran into the same problem, neither the Migration Assistant nor "Restore from Backup" from the 10.5 Install DVD would find a valid backup on my Time Capsule (which kinda renders it useless).
    After some googling and trial and error I found a workaround using Terminal. I don't know why mounting the sparebundle image with Disk Utility wouldn't work, but it isn't available when your computer crashed anyway... So here is my method:
    -Boot from the System DVD, choose the language
    (-Goto Utilities and start the Disk Utility and reformat your drive, if on Intel check that you partition it with GUID, NOT Apple Partition Scheme NOR MBR, restart from DVD) only if something went wrong with your disk like in my case
    -Goto Utilities and start Terminal
    -In Terminal first make a directory for the mount, type: mkdir /Volumes/MyBackup
    -Then mount the Time Capsule and link it to the folder you created, type: mount -t afp afp://myuser:mypassword@IPAdressOfMyTimecapsule/VolumeWhereMyBackupIs /Volume/MyBackup
    -The AFP-Volume is now mounted, but you can't see anywhere.
    -Quit Terminal, this will bring you back to the 10.5 Installer.
    -Goto Utilities and choose "Restore System From Backup"
    -The Dialog will ask you for a Backup Source. You should now see your Time Capsule and an already mounted Time Machine Volume at the location you specified in Terminal.
    -Select the Time Machine Volume and press Continue, it'll take a while you show you all the backups, choose the one you want, choose a destination, drink tea.

  • My Screen Keeps Going to Sleep after restore from Time Capsule

    This is the weirdest thing. I've had a new had drive put in, so I restored the system from Time Capsule. Now for some weird reason the display keeps going to sleep. I can bring it back up with ctrl-shift-eject, but two seconds later it goes back off.
    I've since migrated to Snow, hoping that this would fix the problem, but nada.
    Aaarg!!!!!
    Message was edited by: macfuente

    I've reset SMC as well - it's still doing it randomly

  • Macbook air restored from time capsule backup cannot find ms office product key

    Had a moisture problem on my Macbook Air.  Had to replace with newer pc as could not wait a week for repair.  Had been using Time Machine and a Time Capsule hard drive to back up and the final backup was about 5 minutes before the spill.
    So, I was able to fully restore the new laptop from Time capsule.  Only problem is that I had purchased MS Office and while the programs are restored, when I launch MS Word, it wants the product code.  I cannot find my cd and packaging with the product code from my original purchase.  Any way to get the code off the Time capsule backup?  It must be stored there somewhere but I wonder if it was encrypted and somehow linked to a physical something on the damaged MBAir.
    I'm hoping to not have to buy MS Office again.
    Thanks for any advice.
    JC

    Here you go:
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2279109

  • How to Restore from Time Machine in Single-user mode?

    Hi there, I am trying to fix a Macbook Pro that has had its /private folder trashed and emptied. Obviously it won't boot unless you you boot in to Single User mode and I'm wondering if its possible to do a Time Machine restore from the terminal, I would need the 2nd more recent Time Machine image which is sitting on a Firewire HDD.
    I was going to just see if I could find the orignal OSX install disk and just do a fresh install of the OS which I don't mind doing (since everything important is backed up in Dropbox), but I can't seem to find the CD anywhere nearby, so the Time Machine option would be much preferred.
    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Not sure if this is related enough, but I just wrestled trying to restore from time machine too, trying to reinstall 10.5.8 after putting a new HD in my MBP, 2006 vintage.
    That took sooooo long to get back to where I was before swapping disks; what did the trick was ordering a free copy of Snow Leopard install disk (free due to Apple trying to push people from idisk to icloud) which was rushed FedEx (yay) and which allowed me to access Time Machine where my ancient original OSX install disk had not.
    And all it took was 2 weeks of cursing!

  • How to restore from time machine for another user login

    I use time machine to back my computer which has multiple user login.
    First I set up time machine backup using User A.   I checked that User B files in the hard disk is also backed up, and I can restore using User B login.
    Then I changed the hard disk today and all users I need to recreate again.
    After recreating users, I found that User A can restore files from time machine backup.
    However, files originally under User B cannot be restored using either User A and User B.  The error message is
    "The folder “Documents” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents."
    Anyone can help?

    Not sure if this is related enough, but I just wrestled trying to restore from time machine too, trying to reinstall 10.5.8 after putting a new HD in my MBP, 2006 vintage.
    That took sooooo long to get back to where I was before swapping disks; what did the trick was ordering a free copy of Snow Leopard install disk (free due to Apple trying to push people from idisk to icloud) which was rushed FedEx (yay) and which allowed me to access Time Machine where my ancient original OSX install disk had not.
    And all it took was 2 weeks of cursing!

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