Time Machine backup/restore on iMac with SSD and HD...

Time Machine backs up the SSD and HD on my iMac into one "sparse bundle" for the computer. I need some direction on how to get to the HD backup in order to restore individual files and folders.
PLEASE do not give an answer like "Just enter Time Machine and click Restore." I have been trying to get this to work for hours - if it was so easy, I would not be asking. (I don't mean to sound rude so please don't be offended.)
Thanks for any help.

Sorry, Bob, I see that I didn't say at the beginning of this discussion, but the SSD has all my applications and OS X system. The purpose for the SSD is to run the system and apps faster, while having all files/documents on the slower and larger HD.
So my home folder (my UserName) in the left panel is on the SSD. I have no problem accessing the SSD backups in Time Machine.
When I choose the MacHD in Time Machine, I cannot select a date from the timeline of backups on the far right because all the backups are grayed out (not available). Choosing the SSD gives no access to the files from the separate HD.
I also have a MacBook Pro. It is backed up to the same Time Capsule using Time Machine and has its own separate "sparse bundle." But the iMac puts both of its separate drives into the same sparse bundle. I asked the Apple Support person I spoke with the other day whether I should have separated them before doing the backup, but he said no - it is backed up correctly.
Does anybody out there know if Apple has any specific support articles about using the two separate drives on one computer, whether for backup and restore or for any other purposes?

Similar Messages

Hard drive packed up, but had Time Machine backup. I installed new sad and upgraded to Mountain Lion., but I can't find iPhoto library and photos or iTunes songs? Is there an answer to this? Graham

Hard drive packed up, but had Time Machine backup. I installed new ssd and upgraded to Mountain Lion, but I can't find iPhoto library and photos or iTunes songs? Is there an answer to this? A backup run did not install either photos or songs. Graham

Thanks so much but none of that helped. It was driving me crazy because it would back up another external drive. I just changed the name of the drive from iPhoto/iTunes Library to Media Libraries and IT WORKED!! I guess for some reason it didn't like the drive being called iPhoto or iTunes ???? I don't understand but I have tried so many solutions and exchanging things out but the name change did it????!!!
Thank you for your help and replying to this. Guess I made my own issue!

Time Machine backup restores OS X and Apps

Time Machine backup restores OS X and Apps or only Data?

Hi lseit,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!
I understand that you would like information what what information is restored while restoring from Time Machine. For information on this process, please review the information in the attached article.
Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support
Restoring data from Time Machine backups
With Time Machine, you can go "back in time" to restore files, versions of files, or your entire system. If Time Machine alerts you that your Time Machine backup disk can't be found, make sure your backup drive is connected and mounted.
Best regards,
Joe

Would like to verify Time Machine backup but when I enter TM and then open iPhoto, it only provides me a gray window telling me the size of the file. How do I make sure all iPhoto pictures have been backed up on Time Machine?

Would like to verify Time Machine backup but when I enter TM and then open iPhoto, it only provides me a gray window telling me the size of the file. How do I make sure all iPhoto pictures have been backed up on Time Machine?

HaJo-aus-BS wrote:
Since Snow-Leo time machine offers an option to verify backups, but I have found that it does not work for external disks attached by USB or FireWire.
Yes, that's for network backups only.
What can I do to make sure that the backups are OK?
You can tell if the File System (the various directories, catalogs etc.) is ok by repairing your backup drive, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
You can "spot check" whether the Time Machine "Star Wars" display seems correct.
You can do a full system restore to another disk per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions, then start up from it and see if things are there and seem to work.
You can keep "secondary" backups (always a good idea). See #27 in the FAQ post for some suggestions.

Time Machine backup created on Mac with a large hard disk. What happens when restore to MacBook Air with small SSD drive?

What if a Time Machine backup was created on a Mac with a large hard disk, e.g. 500GB iMac - and I buy a new MacBook Air with a small SSD hard disk e.g 128GB. What happens when I need to use the larger Time Machine file to set up the new MacBook Air? What happens to all those files that can't fit on the smaller SSD drive?

It is not the HD size, but rather the size of the data it contains. If you right-click your 500GB drive and select "Get Info" you can see how much is actually being used.
Naturally if you are using more space than the new drive has, then you have to make some choices about what you want to keep and what you want to keep archived.
I don't know what options are available but you may simply have to do a manual restore of files you want, in groups.

IMac with SSD and Hard drive very slow startup time

I have a new mid 2011 iMac with a 250gb SSD drive and a 2TB drive. All are from Apple as BTO options. When I first used the iMac my typical startup time from the hardware check chime to desktop was typically 12 seconds. Something, somehow has been changed because now it takes over one minute to boot up from the SSD. After the chime I hear the fans running and also the 2tb drive. After about 20 seconds I hear the hard drive spin down and then after another 20 seconds it starts up again. Once it starts up the boot up sequences contiunes and returns to the desktop. After this the iMac perfprms as normal. I have tried running disk utility from the recovery partition. I have also reinstalled Lion as well from the recovery partition and neither of these change the outcome.
When I first got the iMac I used time machine to restore from a previous machine into the 2tb partition and then went into advanced options in System preferences>Users&Groups to point to my home folder on the 2Tb drive rather than the default one on the SSD. That was working fine until I discovered software problems with both Preview and Textedit where they would not start up with this arangement. I then repointed my home folder to the default one on the SSD which cured this issue with these programmes leaving my data remaining on the 2Tb drive. Since doing this I have had the one minute boot up problem.
Can anyone offer any advice as to how I may overcome this problem and get my iMac back to starting up in twelve seconds from the SSD as it did before. Any help would be appreciated on this topic.
Thanks.

Where do you maintain your Home folder - on the SSD or on the HDD?
If you want to do a clean install (from scratch) then do the following:
Install or Reinstall Lion from Scratch
If possible backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive.
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Erase the hard drive:
Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Erase button and wait until the process has completed.
Quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Install button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.
Before you go to the extreme of the above would you do this:
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.
Just in case your system slowness is due to something eating up CPU time. Oh, and if your system is brand new check the upper right corner of the menubar for a "dot" inside the Spotlight glass. This means Spotlight is indexing the drive. Until it finishes your system will be quite sluggish.

Time machine backup from 1TB iMac to 512GB MacBook Pro

Hi all,
I sold my iMac now a few months ago and been hanging out for the new one, but just about to be pursuaded to buy a 512GB MacBook Pro.
My only problem is that we did a Time Machine back up on the old computer, and afraid I won't be able to access that given the space limitations. Is there anyay to only back up part of the items from Time Machine?
Cheers,
El

YGWPhotos wrote:
Is there anyay to only back up part of the items from Time Machine?
You mean restoring only parts? Yes, with the Migration Assistant you can select categories of data. E.g., you may want to leave apps and other data off and install or copy them manually.
However, it's probably not apps using up that much space, but data such as videos, music, images. So, you want to restore them manually, I guess, ideally with Time Machine.

Time Machine backup disappears when iMac sleeps

Tried finding this topic but could not find the specifics. I have an Intel iMac running 10.6.7 and I use a Mercury enclosure with a Seagate Barracuda 2TB SATA for Time Machine backup, connected with FireWire. Every time my Mac goes to sleep overnight, the next morning, the Time Machine icon disappears from the desktop. It's been disconnected, because when I run Check Time Machine, the log reads thusly:
<<Thu Apr 21 10:29:30 com.apple.backupd-auto Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup - time machine destination not resolvable.
Thu Apr 21 12:30:05 [0x0-0x2d22d2].backupd-helper Not starting Time Machine backup after wake - failed to resolve alias to backup volume
>>
Occasionally I'll get the error message on the Mac that a device has been "improperly disconnected" but most of the time when it sleeps the TM drive icon just goes away (even tho the backup drive is still on).
Any ideas? Can I fix this or have to live with it? Are there alternatives to TM that may work better?
Thanks for any help/suggestions.
Best,
Mike

I had the same problem as Bru-Hed, but with a Samsung G3 Station 1 TB with USB-connection. After waking up the MAC the message "improperly disconnected" appeared. Was happy with the solution you gave and changed the power save settings accordingly, the drive holds its power, but....... things did not change. Switching off the MAC and restarting gives no problems with the back-up drive, but after waking up I have to reinstall the back-up drive every time by disconnecting and connecting the USB-connector. After choosing the drive again in Time Machine, everything works properly until the next time the MAC goes asleep......
Any other solution to this problem ?

Auto mount/eject external drive for time machine backup/restore

I have an Iomega ultramax drive connected via firewire 800 for my Time machine backups.
This drive will automatically spin down after a period of non-use. I like this as it means lower power usage and lower risk of data loss (head crashes etc..).
My problem is, when the drive spins down like this, some file open operations pause until the drive spins up again. I cannot remember exactly which applications I have had the problem with, but I assumed that this was part of the OS. This delay can be up to 5 seconds or so and is really annoying.
Assuming this is not just a specific third party application thing. My suggestion to Apple is to do one or both of the following:
1) Multi thread the file open dialog (process?) so that is comes up instantly, and then adds the drive when it has spun up.
2) Modify time machine so that it can automatically mount/eject the external drive just when doing backups and restores.
Currently I have a bit of a messy work around to this problem where I have a loadd scheduled shell script that runs every hour that mounts the drive, runs time machine to backup and the ejects the drive. It works, but is not perhaps as nice a solution as it could be.
Does anybody else suffer from this problem?

Yes that is correct, the drive spins down and remains mounted.
To be perhaps clearer. The problem is not essentially a time machine problem, it is to do with whatever implements the file open capability that other apps use. In the above sitation, there is always a delay for the drive to spin up when I go to open a file (perhaps five seconds) in other applications. I assume this delay is caused by the file open process waiting until some data is retrieved from the external drive before giving me the option of choosing a file. This delay is annoying, as I do not ever want to open a file from my external drive (this is dedicated to time machine backups) when I am using pages, or any other application other than a time machine restore.
This particular issue is similar (but I suspect nowhere near as bad) as one of my pet hates about windows XP. In windows it appears that the explorer will wait for a response on all its connected drives (hard disks, mounted cds, network drives), so any sort of network connectivity or hardware delay will cause explorer to freeze. As explorer seems to be embedded in most things you do with the OS, this can cause anything or everything to freeze (web browsing, you name it).
In my setup, as I have the external drive totally dedicated to time machine backups, another thing that would fix the problem for me is the suggestion number 2 I suggested where time machine auto mounts for the backup and then ejects after the backup. With the feature, then the external drrive will only ever be mounted for short periods of time (the above problem does not ocurr if the external drive is not mounted), and when it is mounted it will be spinning, so I will never have my file open delay. I would however have a short delay when doing a time machine restore for the mount of the drive, but this is a much rarer event the using file open in all my other apps.
Thanks for the info on the feedback link, I will post this to that.

Can't sync applications after Time machine backup restoration

Hello.
I'm running 10.5.4 on a Macbook whose hard drive crashed. I replaced it with another one and restored from my closest time machine backup. Everything is OK with the files, the problem was when I tried to sync my ipod touch.
The ipod is running 2.0.2. It contained 9 applications, but after the first try to sync I got the error message that several applications couldn't be synced. For each of them I had a message like "Application blah blah could not be synced because you lack the permissions to do so".
More importantly, the iPod touch now doesn't contain any of these applications, even though they still get reported as a problem during syncing. Rather than deleted, they seem to be hidding, though I can't access any from the touch.
How can I recover my applications being synced without losing their data?

I have used iTunes to reset the iPod to the factory default settings. After the syncronisation and reuploading of all my music and photos, I still get the same error on application syncing: I have no permissions to sync applications.
I have tried downloading new free applications from the App store, but it is the same, nothing gets synced, the new applications are added to the list of problematic programs that can't be synced.
Here's a snapshot of the error: http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/appsyncerror.png

How can I recover time machine backup from previous iMac?

How can I recover some datas from a Time machine backup regularly done with my old imac,using now my new i7?
Problem is that when I open timemachine app,it's not giving me any chance to go "back" in the past snapshots of my desktop nor giving me any errors.So I suppose I'm doing something wrong
Any help?
Thanks

It's TimeMachine,
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Home.html
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29553/back-in-time

Lightroom 4 Time Machine backup restoration

Hello,
My MacBook Pro has died. I have a complete TimeMachine backup of the harddrive but as an interim measure I will be using a Macbook Air, which cannot accomodate the entire Time Machine backup.
I have tried to drag the Lightroom application from the backup drive to the Air but it asks for a Serial when I open it.
I'd like to know if anyone knows of a way of doing a partial restore of a TimeMachine backup so that I can restore my old catalog, library and settings for Lightroom on the Air without doing a complete transfer of the old hard drive?
Thanks for your help.

Maybe you would have better luck if you asked your question on a Mac forum or TimeMachine forum?
Because this has nothing to do with Lightroom. Your chance to find a LR user here, who has also TimeMachine plus the specific need to restore a partial backup, are obviously rather slim?
Sorry for being of not much help, as a Windows user.
My backup strategy is different: I do backups of my vital data in a less automated way, but I have any partial junk available on several drives.
If my PC dies, I'd have to do a clean install of a new Windows plus my programs and data, which means following a lenghty checklist.
Good luck, Cornelia

Time Machine Backup Restoration Question

Hi and tnxs for reading.
In order to restore an entire time machine backup on a new mac, does the new mac have to run the same version of OSX that was used for the TM backup or not?
In other words, are the old version of TM backup compatible with the following version of OSX?
Example: TM backupped with OSX Mountain Lion. New MAC running OSX Mavericks.
Many tnxs.
Regards.

You will migrate in this case.. otherwise you are going to restore Mountain Lion.
See Pondini.. http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
He discusses the setup assistant and migration assistant. It only covers up to Mountain Lion but the same stuff applies to Mavericks.

Copying from a Time Machine backup to a Mac with Tiger

I've got a Time Machine Backup of my MBP, which is running Leopard (obviously). I'd like to grab all of the files (recursively) from the latest TM backup of my "Documents" directory onto another Mac with Tiger.
From the command line (on the Tiger machine with the TM firewire backup drive connected), I've tried:
sudo cp -RL /Volumes/Daily/Backups.backupdb/My MacBook Pro/Latest/Macintosh HD/Users/sbrown/Documents/* ~/Documents
However, it does not follow the hard links. How can I get it to follow whatever links it needs to to give me a complete set of the files in the Documents folder?

Confirmed best practice (after hours with AppleCare)--will allow you to create a comprehensive backup of whatever you need from a former TM backup, without traversing aliases or needing to keep a Leopard install around after the initial step.
You DO need to have Leopard still installed, just once. Simply boot into Leopard, navigate to your backup volume and go to Latest--> in the Backup DB. This is your entire system as it most recently appeared. If you have enough hard drive space on your TM volume, you can copy every folder here to the root level of the same TM volume. This would ensure a complete, up-to-date and Tiger-visible backup at the root level. However, you can also just copy the folders you need--to the same root level of the TM backup--and the OS will break all the hardlinks and create normal (duplicate) files in the new location.
This is good because it bypasses your likely-small internal hard drive (which, if you're on a Powerbook, is a precious commodity). It just makes a dupe of your most recent backup. The other method (Show Original) won't let you get the entire drive state back easily. It requires manual lookup of every file you think you need, then a reboot into Leopard if you need another. This method lets you create a working archive.
Hope that helps...
Message was edited by: dmaterialized

TIME MACHINE - Backup & Restore Inquiry

I'm new to using Time Machine and I just need to better understand exactly how it works.
Here is my current config:
Mac Pro Tower (2006-2007)
Running OS X: 10.5.8
Primary Hard Drive: 250GB
Primary Use: Logic Pro (for music production)
I want to upgrade the OS to Snow Leopard (which I already own the discs I purchased in 2009). As well I'm going to be chaning out the current 250GB hard drive to a new 1TB hard drive. This drive will be the main operating drive.
I have already done a Time Machine back up of my current 250GB hard drive to an external hard drive, but I'm confused about the restoration. Since this is a new 1TB drive being put in, and since it won't be formated for Mac use already, will I need to boot up from my OS X Leopard discs and reinstall that first?
If yes, I don't know what to do from that point forward in order to restore the rest of the programming from my Time Machine backup (if it's even possible). I need to better understand if Time Machine does a backup of the current hard drive to restore onto my new one, or if regardless of backup I have to re-install all my software (including Logic Pro and tons of plugins) all over again?
Anyone who can help me understand this process better ASAP would be so greatly apprecatied.
THANK YOU!

Yes, I suggest you initialize the new drive while you have the entire resources of Mac OS X available, and because you can start the process and surf the web or catch up on your emails while it works away in the background.
Those "Full Retail" DVDs say they are upgrades, but generally do not require you to install 10.5 Leopard first -- you can install 10.6 Snow leopard onto a newly-initialized drive if it is GUID formatted, MacOS X Extended (journaled). Then use Software Update to bring it up to date.
When you do this you have the equivalent of a "new" machine. Use Pondidini's article (blue underlined text above). he recommends you use Setup Assistant to restore from your backup onto your new machine, and provides instructions.
Setup Assistant is designed to transfer all or selected data, apps, etc. from one Mac, or its Time Machine or "clone" backups, to set up a new Mac just like the old one.

Time Machine backup/restore on iMac with SSD and HD...

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for