Restore time machine from backup, stuck on Apple screen

A Macbook Pro I've restored from a TM backup is stuck in a spinning marker in the Apple bootup screen. Any suggestions to get it booting? Thanks

champ2153 wrote:
I am having the same issue. When I attempt to restore my information from time machine, the restore seems to go well. But..right around the moment of 70% or so on the progress bar, (with about 20 minutes remaining) the "restore was successful" box pops up and prompts me to restart the machine. Upon restart I can not get past the white apple screen. I've tried just installing OSX
When you do that, has all your data been restored? If so, just download and install the "combo" update to get back to 10.6.6.
and then using migration assistant, but migration assistant does not recognize my time machine external. Any thoughts?
Try repairing your backups, per #A5 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

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Time machine - 1st backup - stuck on calculating size

Hello,
I'm running Time Machine for the first time on OSX Lion.
I've bought a external 2,5inch HD of 1TB.
I formatted it to Mac Os X Extended (Journaled). I added the disk as a time machine backup and ran the "backup now".
It's stuck on Calculating Size for about 30 minutes.
Does this take this long? Can't remember it took so long under SL.
thanks in advance,
greetings

champ2153 wrote:
I am having the same issue. When I attempt to restore my information from time machine, the restore seems to go well. But..right around the moment of 70% or so on the progress bar, (with about 20 minutes remaining) the "restore was successful" box pops up and prompts me to restart the machine. Upon restart I can not get past the white apple screen. I've tried just installing OSX
When you do that, has all your data been restored? If so, just download and install the "combo" update to get back to 10.6.6.
and then using migration assistant, but migration assistant does not recognize my time machine external. Any thoughts?
Try repairing your backups, per #A5 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

How to restore time machine from wireless hard drive?

I backed up my data to a wireless hard drive before I wiped my hard drive. But now I'm having trouble restoring it.
Can't restore it from time machine, as it was not fully complete.
Migration assistant asks for a password to the hard drive, which I don't know. The person in my family who bought the drive entered it, but then migration asssistant greys out continue and nothing seems to happen
I opened the hard drive myself and there's a bunch of blank files named 01 349 049 984 and such. No extension.
Help?

The exhaustive list of backup devices supported by Time Machine consists of Time Capsule and locally connected and mounted volumes, period. Time Machine can use NAS devices, but there are many caveats including but not limited to the necessity for AFP to be running on the server. Wireless storage devices introduce yet another element of uncertainty.
OS X Mountain Lion: Disks you can use with Time Machine
Anything else, and you're a test pilot. Let Apple know how it works for you.

Post-restore Time Machine/bundle backup problem

Earlier this week the HD in my iMac died. I had the drive replaced and performed a full restore from my Time Machine backup. The four hour restore went fine.
The next day I turned Time Machine back on. I expected it would want to perform a complete backup of the restored machine. It appeared to start okay, calculating changes and deleting old backups. But then it started doing that in a loop: checking changes, deleting backups, cleaning up, checking changes, deleting backups, etc. After about five cycles I just left work and let it do its thing. Twelve hours later when I got home it still hadn't done a backup, and appeared to be stuck in 'deleting old backups.' So I went ahead and stopped Time Machine.
Now, if I turn TM on or initiate a manual backup, it checks for changes, spends a long time at 99% during that process, then eventually unmounts the bundle, goes to cleaning up, and then hangs there until I manually stop it.
I've tried disk utility, but anytime the backup bundle is mounted, Disk Utility locks up with the spinning beach ball before I ever get to drag the bundle into the window and try to verify/repair.
Any suggestions? At this point I'd be fine erasing the entire bundle and starting new backups from scratch, but I'm not sure how to properly "reset" Time Machine, and of course I can't the bundle to appear in Disk Utility.

blevenstein wrote:
Earlier this week the HD in my iMac died. I had the drive replaced and performed a full restore from my Time Machine backup. The four hour restore went fine.
The next day I turned Time Machine back on. I expected it would want to perform a complete backup of the restored machine. It appeared to start okay, calculating changes and deleting old backups. But then it started doing that in a loop: checking changes, deleting backups, cleaning up, checking changes, deleting backups, etc.
Yes, that cycle could go on for a very long time. Assuming the TC's disk was near full, TM would have to delete a whole lot of backups to make room for a new full backup. Unfortunately, it has to mount the sparse bundle, delete a single backup, dismount the sparse bundle, compact it, then mount it again to see if it's made enough room. The word "excruciating" isn't enough!
Now, if I turn TM on or initiate a manual backup, it checks for changes, spends a long time at 99% during that process, then eventually unmounts the bundle, goes to cleaning up, and then hangs there until I manually stop it.
It's probably still deleting old backups, although it's possible there's one that it can't delete, and is stuck on it.
I've tried disk utility, but anytime the backup bundle is mounted, Disk Utility locks up with the spinning beach ball before I ever get to drag the bundle into the window and try to verify/repair.
That does sound like the sparse bundle is now hopelessly corrupted.
Any suggestions? At this point I'd be fine erasing the entire bundle and starting new backups from scratch, but I'm not sure how to properly "reset" Time Machine, and of course I can't the bundle to appear in Disk Utility.
First, of course, turn TM "off" via TM Preferences.
If there's nothing else on the TC's disk, erase it. Use the +*Airport Utility+* app, in your Applications/Utilities folder. Select +*Base Station > Manual Set-Up+* from the Menubar, then Disks in the tool Bar, then Erase.
If there's other stuff there that you want to keep, and can't copy elsewhere temporarily, just delete the sparse bundle via the Finder.
Then you should be able to turn TM back on and have it start fresh (I'd strongly recommend connecting your Mac to the TC via an Ethernet cable to speed up the initial backup, if at all possible). If there's a problem, you can try the "reset" procedure in #A4 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum.

Restore Time Machine Full Backup After Catastrophic Failure

I am new to the Mac and using Time Machine as my primary backup utility. My concern is the way it creates one full backup at the beginning and only incremental ones after that. If the full backup gets overwritten due to the program needing hard drive space, does it know to create another full backup, even if it needs to delete some older incremental backups?
I am concerned I will need to complete a full restore at some point, and will not be able to do so because there will not be a full backup present on the Time Machine disk.
Also, who has had to restore from a catastrophic disk failure using an external time machine disk? Is this easy? Does it work properly?

you concerns are unfounded. due to the way TM keeps data organized every backup is full and independent of any other backups.
when TM makes a backup it only backs up afresh new and changed files. everything else is _*hard linked*_ to existing backup copies.
deleting an earlier backup to save space as TM does sometimes has zero effect on the remaining backups. they remain full and complete. doing a full system restore from TM is very easy. you boot from the SL install DVD and select "restore system from backup" from Utilities menu.
However, it should be noted that TM is still very buggy and doing a full restore can not be tested until you actually do it. therefore, it's advisable to have a double backup using a different backup tool. bootable clones are the best for doing a full restore. CCCloner and Superduper are excellent cloning backup programs.

Restoring Time Machine from non-fusion drive to a Fusion Drive

I have a mid 2010 iMac (1TB HDD—before they had fusion drives) that I'm thinking of upgrading to the new iMac w/Fusion Drive because it's having hardware issues. I do a lot of development and have installed numerous packages and server configurations, of which I've been terrible at cataloging, so I'm hoping to simply do a full restore of the system from my Time Machine backup.
I've done Time Machine restores before, but I'm not sure if it will work properly. I think I remember reading (back when fusion drives came out) that time machine restores that originated on non-fusion drives can't be restored onto fusion drives. After doing a few searches I can't find reference to that, but I have this nagging memory of reading that at some point. Is this true? If I get a fusion drive will I need to start the system new? If so, will I be able to at least restore my home directory files?
Thanks!

A Fusion Drive won't behave any differently than you expect.

Restore Time Machine from WD My Cloud

Good morning. I recently had my hard drive replaced on my iMac. I had been using My Cloud as the repository for my Time Machine backups. When I started my iMac when I got it home, it is not recognizing where the Time Machine backups are and it does not allow me to navigate to a location to find it. It seems as if the utility is looking for the backups to be directly connected to the machine and not over my network.
Has any encountered this same issue and successfully resolved it? If so, how?
I was on Mountain Lion and now I am on Yosemite.
Thank you,
Jay

Hello, try connecting an ethernet cable directly from your WD to your Mac. Can you find the back-ups now?

Restore Time Machine from WD My Cloud (a network drive)

Good morning. I recently had my hard drive replaced on my iMac. I had been using My Cloud as the repository for my Time Machine backups. When I started my iMac when I got it home, it is not recognizing where the Time Machine backups are and it does not allow me to navigate to a location to find it. It seems as if the utility is looking for the backups to be directly connected to the machine and not over my network.
Has any encountered this same issue and successfully resolved it? If so, how?
I was on Mountain Lion and now I am on Yosemite.
Thank you,
Jay

Hello, try connecting an ethernet cable directly from your WD to your Mac. Can you find the back-ups now?

Error restoring Time Machine from 10.8.2, iCloud Document?

Hi
created a fresh time machine backup and reinstalled my macbook.
I wanted to restore it manually (only restoring some folders via time machine), but this failes:
"FILENAME" cannot be converted. Please install a newer version of iWork.
The file "FILENAME" seems to be a file in my home directory --> library --> mobile document on the time machine backup.
I already have installed all iWork updates.
Any ideas?

no ideas?

Restore Time Machine from earlier OS X

Hello,
My HDD died recently and I purchased a new one, which has 10.7.3 installed on it. My previous version of OS X was 10.6.8
I had made a TM back up just prior to the HDD failing, so am wondering can I restore my files from a 10.6.8 TM backup to 10.7.3? I only want my documents, music, photos etc.
Thanks
Sarah

Upon first boot of the new system/drive wit a fresh install of OS X, use the TM backup from the old system to load accounts, data, and apps using Setup Assistant (whatever parts of it you wish).

Restore Time Machine backup from different computer?

I'm going to put a new HD in my MacBook Pro.
Once I've done it will it be possible to restore my user folder, applications etc. from a different computer's (Power Mac) Time Machine backup?

Thanks again Joe.
One last question. Once I've transferred my files from the Power Mac's Time Machine disk could I select that disk in MacBook Pro's Preferences as it's Time Machine backup disk?
(Effectively stop using it as the Power Mac's backup disk & continue using it as the MacBook Pro's backup disk).
Backing up new files on the MacBook Pro to the disk, but still be able to 'go back in time' & restore files from the Time Machine disk (backup up over time on the Power Mac).

How do I upgrade to snow leopard and then restore my files from my time machine HDD backup...without losing any data or reinstalling leopard (10.5)?

How do I upgrade to snow leopard (from leopard 10.5) and then restore my files from my time machine HDD backup...without losing any data or reinstalling leopard (10.5)?

Hello, it's great you have a backup, but 10.6 should just Install 10.6 system files over the top of 10.5 system files, & leave all your data intact on the drive.

How do I restore time machine alias files cloned from broken hard drive

My external hard drive broke (a tiny transistor broke off after the drive fell two feet to the floor) so I purchased a new one and had the Geek Squad clone what was on my old hard drive onto my new one. I was using Time Machine to backup my files. My external hard drive had a much larger capacity than my macbook pro, so I deleted a number of the files saved on my Macbook Pro, knowing that I could access my files whenever I plugged my ext. hard drive in.
After plugging my new external hard drive into my computer, however, I am finding only alias files and I do not know how to restore my data so I can access all of the files again.
Does anyone know how to restore my time machine data from the cloned data I had transferred from my broken external hard drive to my new external hard drive?
Thanks!

morrisck wrote:
An update - I finally took both of my HDs in to an Apple store and they confirmed my fear: only alias files had been transferred from my old drive, meaning Geek Squad charged me $100 for 850 MB of unusable files.
That has been clear since early in this thread.
Geek Squad has agreed to retry the process
Why pay them to do what you don't need done??? Get a refund and buy an enclosure, which you should have anyway for backups.
but I'm now wishing that I had received more sound advice when I brought the drives into them in the first place.
Don't know who gave you that advice, but I sure wouldn't trust them with my data!
The Apple rep. informed me that my HD works perfectly fine and that it just needs a new enclosure (which I can buy for $20 online, as opposed to paying $100 for a data transfer).
Ummm, the action to take seems very clear to me . . . .

Can't restore Time Machine backup after iMAC (Lion) Refresh

I recently did a refresh of my iMAC with OSX Lion. I have been using time capsule to back up my iMAC as well as my Mac Mini for the last 6 months with what I perceived to be no issues.
When I got to the part in the MAC start up to restore from backup it couldn't seem to find the iMAC backup, only the Mac Mini backup so I skipped that part. I then tried to use Migration Assistant later and the same thing, I couldn't find it. I used finder to locate the Time Capsule and was able to find the backup, but when I double clicked on it said "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Time Machine Backups". you can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to the files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can".
Even though it said that it open a new finder window and I was able to find the backups and I proceed to copy of the files over. All seemed well until I opened iPhoto and it wouldn't open (just hung). I did a library restore/repair by clicking Option + Command when opening and after it ran iPhoto opened. When I browsed around though some recent pics that I uploaded either weren't there or corrupted and all my faces were gone.
I did a fresh install again and tried all over and the same thing happened. Any help on getting back my old backup? Seems to be corrupted or something, but I'm not sure.
See previous post before this... I was told to post my problem here - as I originally posted on the iPhoto forum before I realized I had a time machine / capsule problem.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/22248885?ac_cid=op123456#22248885
Help would be appreciated.

lonniebrunet wrote:
Hi there,
I had a look through and I tried to do option A5 - which is repair or verify disk. I dragged the sparebundle for the mackup to disk utility and after trying to do a repair I got the message "disk utility stopped repairing "Time Machine backups".
Does this mean that my backup is corrupted and useless for a restore with time machine?
Yes.
And that also means copying via the Finder may not get everything. Corrupted is corrupted.
Assuming you copied from the most recent backup, you might want to try copying just the iPhoto Library from an earlier one -- that might not be damaged. If you have room, put it somewhere else, like your desktop. Or if you have an external HD, that would work.

Time Machine "preparing backup" eternally upon wake from sleep

at a bit of a loss here...
iMac 24" (version which offered 7300GT as BTO option)
10.5.5 with all updates applied
LaCie 500 gig USB 2.0 drive directly attached.
Up until about two months ago, Time machine functioned fined. Then for some reason, the following started to happen. (no known reason, no software update related etc, that I know of)
scenario... Time Machine functions correctly EXCEPT when waking from sleep. If iMac wakes from sleep and attempts a backup immediately (e.g. more than one hour has passed), it gets stuck "preparing backup" forever. I've let it run overnight (actually as long as about 30 hours), it never stops. Finder and other programs become extremely non-responsive, machine is almost unusable. Literally, the only way out is to manually shut down external drive, with attendant warnings/errors.
What I've done:
1) deleted the time machine .plist file
2) erased, repartioned (as a single partition) external drive
3) started brand new time machine backup (takes about three hours)
At this point, time machine will backup up fine... I can force a successful backup, if I leave the machine running, at one hour it does a successful backup.
BUT, as soon as it goes to sleep, time machine is hosed.
The only workable method for using time machine is to turn the external drive and time machine off when not using it, and turn the whole shootin' match on to do what essentially becomes manual backups. These backup are fairly lengthy, as time machine also does lengthy "preparing backup", but they complete in about 30 minutes to one hour.
Given that time machine doesn't give mountable/cloneable backup, I'm probably going to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Still, I like the ease/regularity of Time Machine, and would use it if it works.
Any ideas?
thanks

It could be a number of things. There are lots of things that Time Machine does in order to "manage" backups -- apart from just copying data to the backup drive.
It has to manage the transition of hourly backups into daily backups and must also transition daily backups into weekly backups. Each time it does this it has to move a lot of data around. It also has to maintain indexes of everything so you can quickly find backups should you want to perform a restore.
I've also noticed that there are circumstances that can cause TM to question whether it can trust it's existing backup database... I've caught Time Machine saying that it needs to do a "deep traversal" of the backup (basically it wants to check and see what it really has) and this can take a very long time.
Still... 30 hours is an extremely long amount of time. I'm almost wondering if there's a problem with either your USB bus or your drive when they wake up such that you may be getting a huge number of retries on something that should have happened quickly.
I'd suggest you start the "Console" utility, select "All Messages" at the left, and then watch the messages being written to your log file. Not only does Time Machine log all of it's progress messages to the system.log (in more detail than you'd see in the Time Machine UI), but so do lots of other system processes. If you're getting USB bus problems the error messages would likely show up in the same log. I'm especially suspicious about non-TM related causes since you said you've already blown away your TM backups & preferences and started from scratch and you're still getting the problem.
Try re-creating your problem with the Console log messages being displayed and see if you can't see something in the log that would let you get a little closer to the root cause.
Regards,
Tim

Restore time machine from backup, stuck on Apple screen

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