How to restore from Time Machine after HD change?

Hi I am having my hard drive replaced due to the issue with the Seagate hard drives. I have a Lacie NAS which is working with Time Machine. I wanted to know, once I have my iMac back with a new hard drive, how do I restore everything from Time Machine?
Thanks

Have a look at this thread I posted in earlier and the various links in Pondini's excellent Time Machine resource I linked to:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/20367932#20367932

Similar Messages

How to restore from time machine after HDD upgrade on macbook pro?

Hi,
I have recently bought a WD 2.5 inch SATA 750GB 7200RPM 16GB HDD and plan to use it on my macbook pro 13 inch 2.4ghz early 2011. I will leave the pysical installation part to Apple Service. I have my Time Machine backup on an external hard disk. So, once I get the upgraded macbook, what are the steps I should follow for a complete Time Machine restore? (Including the formatting on the new HDD).
One more question; when I transfer my applications to the new HDD will Time Machine "remember" their activation codes and license information ?
Thanks a lot.

http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/14.html
This has all the instructions for a complete restore, including how to format the disk. Pondini's site probably has anything else you want to know too.
Good luck!

How do I Restore from Time Machine after I have reinstalled my system software (Snow Leopard and then Lion) ?, How do I Restore from Time Machine after I have reinstalled my system software (Snow Leopard and then Lion) ?

I have never done this before, so can someone explain in detail how I reintall my system software and then restore from Time Machine please ?

Your profile indicates that you currently have an older version of Snow Leopard (10.6.2). In order to install Lion, a prerequisite is the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Perhaps a few more details would be helpfull in solving your problem. ex. If all you want to do is to upgrade to Lion, a restoration of data is unneccessary. Download the latest version of Snow Leopard and then download (purchase) and install Lion. User data will remain intact.
If I am missing something, please elaborate.
Ciao.

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!

Selectively restore from Time Machine after reformatting

I just reformatted my drive and reinstalled Mountain Lion and then upgraded to Mavericks. I backed up to Time Machine just before the reinstall. Time Machine did combine my first new backup with the ones before the reinstall, which I can see when I browse through the Time Capsule.
I would like to restore some things from the Time Machine timeline, however when I enter the timeline, the backups prior to the reinstall are named in purple on the dateline and the Finder windows are black and inaccessible. I suspect this is because after the reinstall the computer has a new account name, so the permissions are different on the previous backups with the old account name.
Does anyone know how to get the older backups to be accessible in the timeline? I would like to just selectively restore a few things as needed, and would like to do the "restore from Time Machine" rather than drag copying files from the mounted backup.

I would like to just selectively restore a few things as needed, and would like to do the "restore from Time Machine" rather than drag copying files from the mounted backup.
For this type of activity, you might want to take a look at Migration Assistant on your Mac, located as follows:
Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Migration Assistant
More info here: OS X: How to migrate data from another Mac using Mavericks

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!

Can't restore from time machine after SSD upgrade

Macbook Pro 13" mid-2009, 10.7.5 Lion
I just swapped out my 160GB HDD with a 250GB SSD on my MBP. When I booted up, I pressed Command-R to try to get into recovery mode but all it does was showing a gray folder with a question mark on it.
I had previously backed up my HDD with time machine. My original HDD is no longer available because I tried to upgrade to Mavericks (since the command-R was not working) and upon restarting my MBP was locked with system pin code (that is another nightmare all by itself)
What are my options besides getting a 10.7 Lion CD from the apple store and try to boot it up that way? and then restore from time machine?
Any other way I can get into receovery mode?
Thanks (My MBP is now a brick sitting on my desk)

It's a bare drive so it isn't formatted and it doesn't yet have a Recovery HD installed on it.
Your computer originally came with a version of Leopard installed. You can reinstall it if you still have the original discs that came with the computer. Or, if you have a retail Snow Leopard DVD you can reinstall Snow Leopard from which you can then upgrade to Mavericks (Lion is no longer available for re-download.) It's unlikely your local Apple Store has a Lion USB flash drive or DVD although you can certainly make an appointment and ask for their help.
You should see if you can boot from the Recovery HD invisible image in your Time Machine backup drive. Connect it to the computer and use OPTION boot to get the boot manager. If you see a Recovery HD on your backup drive displayed, then boot from it.

Restoring from Time Machine AFTER install

My hard drive crashed, so i had to buy a new one (WD scorpio blue). I replaced it, then reinstalled from the install disk (10.4.10, Tiger). That was mistake one. What I meant to do was to restore from my time machine backups on an external HD. I also have the leapord disk that came with, which i forgot to install from, my second mistake. so my question is -- do i have to erase the hard drive and start back over to install from my TM back up, or can i do it either during the upgrade to Leopard or from Tiger?
Thanks.

Matt Clifton wrote:
Boot from your Leopard disk (with your TM drive connected), and go to Utilities - Restore from Time Machine Backup.
So, using this procedure will restore my MB onto a totally new hard drive with all my programs back intact along with any files?
If so, this looks like a great way to replace/upgrade a hard drive. Re "go to Utilities", is this folder or option from the Leopard disk?

How to restore from Time Machine onto an external drive

Hi all,
I am a backup freak, and I don't feel entirely safe with Time Machine taking care of backing up my system unless I can test every now and then that I would be able to do a full restore. I've had problems in the past with .Mac/MobileMe's Backup.app, which would not be able to restore from an otherwise apparently successful backup, for one reason or another.
So, is there a way to test a full restore from Time Machine onto an external hard drive?
Thanks for your advice

Allamistakeo wrote:
Hi all,
I am a backup freak, and I don't feel entirely safe with Time Machine taking care of backing up my system unless I can test every now and then that I would be able to do a full restore. I've had problems in the past with .Mac/MobileMe's Backup.app, which would not be able to restore from an otherwise apparently successful backup, for one reason or another.
So, is there a way to test a full restore from Time Machine onto an external hard drive?
of course. connect an external, boot from the snow leopard DVD and choose "restore system from backup" from the utilities menu. follow the instructions and choose the external drive as the restore destination. make sure it's properly formatted. it should be formatted mac os extended with GUID partition scheme.
also, you might want to consider doing secondary backups in addition to TM by making a bootable clone on another external drive. use CCCloner or Superduper for such backups.
Thanks for your advice

How to restore from time machine different OS

I am going back to snow leopard (from OS 10.8 back to 10.6) using my mac book pro (mbp). I backed up my data using time machine then loaded the orig OS from disk (leopard). This erased my HD on my mbp. I loaded the orig OS successfully (leopard). When I tried to restore data and apps from time machine, it said I could not because the time machine was backed up using 10.8 (and I needed to upgrade if I was going to restore from time machine). The point is I dont want to upgrade (I am downgrading away from 10.8 back to 10.6). Another option is restore from another mac. I have another mac (mini) running 10.6 and I transfered the time maching data from my mbp to the mac mini. Now I am trying to restore data and apps from the mini to the mpb (using a firewire). Is there any easier method??

You made a mistake: create a Time Machine backup on Mountain Lion. Doing this, you can't restore the backup on older versions, so if you want to downgrade, you will have to restore the files manually, taking so much time, and you will have to reinstall all your applications.
To transfer your files from your Mac mini to the MacBook Pro, you can use FireWire without any problem (furthermore, it's the fastest way). Connect the FireWire cable, open Migration Assistant on both computers and follow the steps

HT5097 How to restore from time machine?

I've backup my Macbook Air Using time machine before reformat it to have window partition.
However, after installing OS Lion 10.7.4, how do I restore back all my application and data on my last backup from time machine?
Thks

See
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Restore from time machine after hard drive install

I just had apple replace my hard drive on my Imac. I backed up everything with my external hard drive My Book. Tried to do a restore with Time Machine and it won't do it. I get a message that come up that says "Time Machine can't be modified or deleted because its required by Mac OS X. What steps am I missing to restore with Time Machine?

Hello, I personally don't use TM, but...
Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can't imagine something not being covered there.

Restoring from Time Machine after 1T hard drive replacement

I am a super computer novice. I picked up my computer yesterday after having the recalled Seagate hard drive replaced. I backed up my computer using Time Machine before I took it in on a Seagate "Backup Plus" portable hard drive.
Now, when I have tried to use the restore start up, the computer recognizes that my drive is connected, but says there are no files on that drive it can use to restore the system.
I can see that there are 50GB on the disk, and when I look in it, there are files called "Macintosh HD" so that makes me think that my stuff is in fact on my external drive. why can't my computer see it?
Do I need to get a FireWire cord to connect to my computer? I'm using the USB 3.0 that came with the hard drive.
My computer had Mountain Lion when I backed it up. I think it is back to whatever OS it came with originally. Do I need to update to Mountain Lion? If I do, how do I do so without having to pay for it again? My app store is empty since my computer was wiped.
Thanks for the help, I really need it!

The first thing to do is upgrade back to ML, which you can easily do. Just redownload ML from the app store with the same AppleID you used the previous time you purchased the ML upgrade. Your purchase is tied to the AppleID you used when buying, so you can download it again (as many times as you wish) without payment as long as you use the same AppleID.
Once you have upgrade it to ML, then try the restore from the backup (which I gather was made when while running ML before).

I cant restore from time machine after mountain lion update

i recentlz went to Apple Geius to get my HD formatted as i had a corrupt disk. Once cleaned and my hardware all verified as OK, i got the apple store to load Mountain Lion, previously running Snow Leopard. I came home conneted to my time machine and it restored evrything that from this mornings back up no issues.
When i try to access time machine to look at previous days back ups i get error code 6584
also time machine shows no dated back ups beyond today.
Any ideas?
thxs
Simon

First, I strongly suggest that you make another full backup to a locally-attached external hard drive. You should do that anyway. One backup isn't enough to be safe, and backing up over a network is less reliable than backing up locally. Then try each of the following steps that you haven't already taken.
1. Restart the backup device. You can do that by disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord.
2. Hold down the option key and select Verify Backups from the TM menu in the menu bar (not the Dock icon.) This operation may take a long time. If the menu-bar icon (a clock that runs backwards) isn't showing, check Show Time Machine in menu bar in the preferences.
3. Erase the backup device. With a Time Capsule, you do that from within the AirPort Utility application; see its built-in help for details. All backups will be lost, so don't do this until you've backed up to another device. After erasing, select the TC again as a backup destination in the TM preference pane. The first backup should be made over a wired connection, if possible.

How to restore from Time Machine after HD change?

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