HT201250 I use Snow Leopard and tried restore my Macbook pro using Time Machine.

Question

After waiting a considerable time for Time Machine to restore my whole system, applications and files I had problems in that my Macbook Pro would not restart. The Apple logo appeared but then the screen scrolled down and a lot of letters, numbers and symbols appeared - not making any sense, and a box appeared telling me to restart holding down the on button. This I did. However it kept on repeating. In the end I had to reinstall the whole lot. Fortunately I had backed up all my files. I cannot use some of the programs I have because I cannot retrieve them. I do not have a disk with them on to reload because I downloaded them from the net and they are old progs and still did what I wanted. A lot of files I have saved do not open now without the old system and apps.Can anyone come up with an idea?

Answer 1

ds store wrote:
Ah that's good to hear, does this still work if TimeMachine updates to reflect the 10.7 drive?
There is no special update.  After installing Lion, Time Machine will do a normal "incremental" backup, of the stuff that's new or changed.  That will be relatively large and lengthy, of course, since OSX and the default Apple apps will all be backed-up.
But there's nothing else different about the TM drive. It stil contains all the past backups, including older versions of OSX.
In other words if a user upgrades to 10.7 and doesn't like it after a few days/weeks, has TM connected and it updated to relfect 10.7, can the user c boot off the 10.6 disk erase and restore 10.6 from the TM drive?
Yes, except you don't have to erase. 
You just boot from the Snow Leopard Install disc and do a full system restore.  That includes erasing the destination, so it doesn't matter what's on it.  Then everything on the backup is restored, including OSX, apps, users, data, settings, etc., just as it was at the time of the backup selected.
See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14, especially step (g).  The sample is a bit fuzzy -- it's a photo, since you can't screenprint there, but note that the last two backups were made on Snow Leopard:
Once that's done, and the system restarts, you can use the "Star Wars" display to restore selected items from later (ie, Lion) backups, but of course in some cases (Mail for one), the Snow Leopard apps won't work with the Lion-formatted files.