Restore Time Machine backup to newly-formatted Macintosh HD

Question

I recently had to erase and re-format my internal start-up drive ("Macintosh HD," formatted GUID Partition Table) while troubleshooting. Turned out it was a failed main logic board, display and display LED backligh, so it was in the Apple Store for 2-3 weeks (long story). I have my Time Machine backups on an external 2TB USB drive, which has its own system, and is bootable. The newest Time Machine backup I have is from 11/13/11, but I thought I'd be safe and do a belt and braces backup, so I used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup Macintosh HD to a disk image. Somehow, I royally screwed it up, and I have THREE CCCloner backups on my 2TB drive (as well as the Time Machine backups). The three CCCloner backups are:
2011-10-26 (October 26) 15-52-21, total 14.18 GB (no System or Users folders)
2011-11-13 (November 13) 21-47-17, total 16.86 GB (System folder = 136.1 MB; Users folder = 1.54 GB)
2011-11-20 (November 20) 18-58-00, total 12.84 GB (System folder = 27.6 MB; Users folder = 1.05 GB)
It would seem I somehow invoked an incremental backup in CCCloner, and I do manual Time Machine backups.
The problem here is two-fold:
1. Between 11/13/11 (last Time Machine backup) and 11/20/11 (last CCCloner backup), I did a LOT of work, that I don't want to lose, but I don't know how to reconcile the three CCCloner backups. I've been in communication with the developer of CCC, but apparently he's taken the weekend off, and we have not yet worked out a way to cleanly reconcile the three CCCloner backups, which is what I would MOST like to do, as it contains the whole week's work between 11/13/11 and 11/20/11.
2. When I erased and reformatted my startup Macintosh HD, I, of course, severed any link between it and the Time Machine backups on the 2TB USB drive.
I suppose the quick and dirty way to get back to my Macintosh HD status is to do the following (found in an Apple Support Archived document):
"Once the drive has been formatted, quit Disk Utility to return to the installer. Go back to the "Utilities" menu again, and choose "Restore From a Time Machine Backup." Connect your Time Machine backup drive, and allow it to be scanned for valid backups. Choose your latest backup from the list provided, choose the destination for the restoration (the newly formatted "Macintosh HD"), then let it do its thing."
Then cherry-pick the new-to-11/20/11 items out of the  CCCloner folders. Not an elegant solution, but I can't think of any other. I don't mind reformatting the Macintosh HD again, but then having to pick through the CCCloner dustbin is a big PITA
Anyone have any ideas?
Bart

Answer 1

<< Are the backups in a separate partition?  If not, that may be a problem.
How about the CCC backups? >>
Nope to both.
<< That doesn't make sense.  A CCC clone should contain the most recent version of everything (unless you omitted things).  Where are you getting those sizes? >>
Individual folder "Get infos."
<< Yes, that's how you do a full system restore from your Time Machine backups. >>
Which I did last night, needing to move on with a number of projects.
<< You should be able to use the Finder to find files on the CCC backup from your home folder with Last Modified Dates since 11/13 (or, perhaps better, the free Find Any File app, which will let you pick any folder), and copy them. >>
<< May I ask why, with an iMac, you're doing all your backups manually, rather than letting at least some of them, especially Time Machine, run automatically? >>
The discussion below with Mike Bombich, of CCC, to which I replied just a couple minutes ago, may help explain some things (it will NOT explain my stupidity -- my only excuse is that I was pressed for time after a long and pointless search in all the wrong places for a very severe problem I was having, as you'll see). Why I didn't do a Time Machine backup just before I took my iMac in for service is a question I can only answer by saying "Duhhhh..."
Email from Mike Bombich and my reply between dotted lines
December 3, 2011 8:04:33 PM EST
Hi Bart:
<blockquote>Choosing the "2TB" drive as the "source" in CCCloner would give me the actual, bootable 2TB's system, which has few, if any, of the permissions, settings, etc. that were part of the the original Macintosh HD System files, which is what I'm trying to recover.</blockquote>
Unless you backed up another system to the 2TB volume since November 20, then that volume definitely has everything from your Macintosh HD as of Nov 20. You ran this task at that time:
2011-11-20 18:57:58 -0500
Task: Copying selected files (-psn_0_106522)
Source: Macintosh HD
Mount point: /
Destination: 2TB
Destination path: /Volumes/2TB
Settings
Archive deleted items, owner: bartonbrown
Archive modified items
Do not automatically prune archives
Which means that everything from your Macintosh HD volume was copied to the 2TB volume, and anything that was already on the 2TB volume was moved aside to the _CCC Archives folder. With the exception of the presence of the _CCC Archives folder, the 2TB volume was an *exact* replica of your Macintosh HD volume when that backup task finished on Nov 20.
I think this actually means that the restore process should be really easy. CCC won't copy the contents of the _CCC Archives folder (unless you choose it as a source folder explicitly), so if you choose the 2TB volume as the source and Macintosh HD as the destination, your Macintosh HD volume should be back to the state it was in on Nov 20. I don't see any need to exclude anything from the restore -- anything that wasn't on the Macintosh HD volume was moved to the _CCC Archives folder.
As an aside, you aren't going to find the bulk of your (most recent) Macintosh HD items in the _CCC Archives folder, that folder contains items that were on the 2TB volume when you started that backup task (which means there probably are some pretty important items in the _CCC Archives/2011-11-20 (November 20) 18-58-00 folder). You will find some items from Macintosh HD in there, but they're older versions of files from previous backups, and items that you have since deleted from Macintosh HD.
<blockquote>is there any way to back up onto an already bootable drive with CCCloner and STILL be able to choose the INDIVIDUAL CCC backup I want to restore the Macintosh HD drive.</blockquote>
Yes:
1. Create a new folder at the root level of the destination volume (e.g. "Macintosh HD 12-03-11")
2. Choose "Macintosh HD" from the Source menu
3. Choose "Choose a folder..." from the Destination menu and select the new folder that you created on the destination
When you want to restore from that, you'd boot from the 2TB volume, then in CCC choose "Choose a folder" from the Source menu and select that folder as the source.
You could also choose the "Create a new disk image" option, but I personally prefer backing up to a folder if the destination volume is formatted as HFS+.
Lastly, one thing to keep in mind with either of these solutions is that subsequent backups directly to the 2TB volume (with default settings) will cause the unique backup folder on the destination to be archived. You can avoid that by using CCC's "Protect root-level items on the destination" option. That's the setup I alluded to earlier, in the "I want to back up my startup disk and a data volume to the same backup disk" article.
Mike
To which I replied:
December 4, 2011 1:13:45 PM EST
Hi Mike --
"Unless you backed up another system to the 2TB volume since November 20, then that volume definitely has everything from your Macintosh HD as of Nov 20 ...and anything that was already on the 2TB volume was moved aside to the _CCC Archives folder. With the exception of the presence of the _CCC Archives folder, the 2TB volume was an *exact* replica of your Macintosh HD volume when that backup task finished on Nov 20.
Oddly enough, it wasn't: for one example, the Time Machine backups, which were NEVER on the Macintosh HD volume, are still on the 2TB backup volume, untouched, and so are literally thousands of files and folders I had backed up directly to the 2TB backup volume -- and thousands more I'm pretty sure weren't -- that DIDN'T end up in the _CCC Archives folder, but at the root level of the 2TB volume.
I wish I'd done a window grab of the 2TB backup volume's window before I did my 11/20/11 backup, and before I restored Macintosh HD from Time Machine, but I was so caught up in testing -- 60 hours worth, and all to no purpose -- for what a senior advisor fromr a company whose name is associated with the pomaceous fruit of the species M. domestica (genus Malus, family Rosaceae) was positive was a problem with third-party memory, just before we finally set up the FOURTH Malus domestica store appointment and I had to bundle the iMac up and drag it 40 miles to discover that the "Senior Advisor" was wrong and I was right -- for a change -- that it was a failed main logic board, well... I was working against time, I finally ran OUT of time, and all I can come up with to account for the current state of 2TB is that didn't do the CCCloner backup correctly. (I know that sentence is really poor grammatically, but when one has to tiptoe around landmines, circumlocution is better than circumambulation.
Last night, I had to restore Macintosh HD from Time Machine, which worked fine, except I now have literally hundreds of gigabytes of duplicate files (better than lost ones!) spread over 3 drives. The only recourse I can think of now is to use TidyUp! to winnow out the duplicates and try to understand better how to use CCCloner for backups, or surrender and use Time Machine.
Thanks for all your help. I have a couple other projects I wanted to finish up today, but I can see the day is going to be devoted to salvage operations...
I will just add this: The 2TB USB drive I use as a backup for Time Machine has been bootable since before I started using it as a backup, as is my 1TB USB drive, and all three -- Macintosh HD, 1TB, 2TB -- are at OS X 10.6.8. I also manually back up individual items to both 1TB and 2 TB drives.
Bottom line is, I obviously don't quite know how CCC works, and I thought I could back up -- at the last minute -- my internal, regular start-up drive, "Macintosh HD," to a Disk Image with CCC.
As for Time Machine, its constant and unfathomable-to-me backing up drove me nuts, so I turned it off, and used it to back up, manually, about once a week. Stupid? Yes.
Mea culpa
Bart