Time Machine Won't Restore

I have a case open with Apple support about this, and it's been escalated to engineering, but it will take til at least Monday before they get back to me.
Running Leopard 10.5.1 on a Macbook Pro 17 Core Duo 2.16ghz
Using a Seagate USB 500G FreeAgent as the backup drive.
Time Machine sees the drive and backs up with no problems.
Something blew up in networking subsystem yesterday (got couldn't allocate buffer size domain:55 errors in Safari and Mail. Had network connectivity, but no networking application would function. Parallels and IChat crash on startup. Entourage and Mail can't connect to servers. Safari wouldn't load any sites, gave me the domain:55 error above. IP address assigned, could renew IP address, could ping any address)
Disk repair revealed mismatch in file and directory counts (off by 2.) Repaired. Problem not fixed. Permissions repaired. No help. Reinstalled Leopard. Network problem solved.
But the real problem is that I can't restore from the Time Machine Backup. Using restore from backup during installation: finds external drive, says Max OS X System Not Found. Using Migration Assistant, doesn't find external drive at all.
Time Machine shows all two weeks of backups, include all system subdirectories, applications, user files, etc. Showing hidden files reveals all UNIX directories seem to be intact.
I can restore individual files or directories from the Time Machine interface. Can't do any type of system restore or migration. I would prefer not having to reinstall all apps and coaxing parallels to work with the restored virtual machines, as I've had problems with that in the past.
Any help would be apprecated.

Well, after more work exploring the backups, it appears that what I thought were complete backups were not. About half my applications, including Stickies, Quicktime and Spaces all were backed up as zero byte files. Also, all the photos in my IPhoto library disappeared. So I can only assume that some core OS files were also corrupted or backed up as zero byte files.
I have to say that Time Machine is a bust. I just plugged in my external drive and let Time Machine do its thing; I didn't make any configuration changes.
I have to look into a third party solution for the time being. ***** to lose some really great photos.

Similar Messages

Time machine won't restore to my new MacBook Pro

Early 2011 15" MacBook Pro is now needing its fourth new keyboard/logic board in one year.
So I bought a new 15" MacBook expecting to easily migrate to it. Migration Assistant did well moving the applications over but failed with my Documents.
I concluded that I would restore my documents using Time Machine backups.
Except that Time Machine won't allow me to see the documents that need to be restored. I did the "Inherit older backups" thing, and there IS a pink time line showing the older machine backups - I just can't access them.
Any thoughts on how to resolve this?

Since you have both machines connected why don't you use Migration Assistant to transfer your Home folder? Or you can simply drag your documents from the old computer's connected hard drive.
I hope you realize that Migration Assistant will not transfer your Home folder if you have a new Home folder with the same name. Instead it will create a whole new Home folder with a different name. Have you checked to see if you have two user folders located in your /Users/ folder?

Time Machine won't restore a critical backup - disk space not sufficient error

Using Time Machine Restore Backup says my Macintosh HD has 55 GB available. I need to restore a 50GB Time Machine Backup from an external disk to the Macintosh HD device as the transfer destination of the restore copy it it gives me a message 'This Disk does not have enough space to restore your system'. In fact trying to restore all my many time backups over the past months give the same error even though the backup size is less then my Macintosh HD destination.
So I used the Time Machine software to delete many of my documents in the backup that I want to restore, now it is 30 GB through the Time machine finder, but restoring still gives me the same error. However, time machine made a new backup of my system today of 30 GB but when I go through the backup process using this, there is no error about there not being enough space.
It seems although the finder in Time Machine recognises that file is just 30 GB, in the restore process it doesn't recognise that file has been reduced to 30GB

If you're trying to add a large amount of data all at once, and you get an alert of insufficient space, then from the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences... ▹ Time Machine
If the padlock icon is closed, click it to unlock the settings and authenticate. Turn Time Machine OFF, then back ON and close the preference pane. Restart the computer. Test.

Time machine won't restore back to lion

Mountain Lion is causing me big problems. My external firewire 800 hard drives will not stay mounted and my fans are running at full speed after waking from sleep. Restarting fixes these problems until it sleeps again. Sometimes it takes several restarts.
So I am trying to revert back to Lion the day before I foolishly upgraded to ML and Time Machine will not allow me to restore any of my old backup prior to ML. How can I get rid of ML without loosing data and taking up tons of my time?

Time Machine will not allow you to go back to a previous OS version, unless you are running that version. So if you are running Mountain Lion, it will only restore to ML back ups.
Others have done what you want to, if you have a OS X LION install disc/usb. You will have to manually copy over data as you should always back up your system regardless.
Source; Derek Currie https://discussions.apple.com/message/19105493#19105493
"Time Machine does not provide bootable backups. Therefore, this is not the solution.
If you bought Lion, you should be able to re-download it from the Mac App Store. (Sadly, Apple pulled the ability to actually buy Lion off the store). You should be booted to another volume other than the one you will be installing to. You may have to disable the installation on the disk you wish to move back to Lion. I'm not certain, but suspect that trashing the ML System folder would do the job. The Installer will probably notice the missing OS and allow the Lion install. If not, then you'd have to go to the root directory of that volume, make invisible files visible and trash the 'Kernel' files and try again to install Lion.
Ideally you can use the Time Machine backup to restore just about everything else. But you may find everything works fine after the install.
I beta tested 10.8 Mountain Lion and know that it had a couple remaining bugs upon release. That's what updates are for. I expect there will be a rapid release of 10.8.1 update via the Mac App Store. It may well be worth hanging in there with 10.8. It is most definitely an IMPROVEMENT over Lion, whose Finder bugs I absolutely hate. (But that problem may soon be solved with the 10.7.5 update coming soon).
If you look around the net you'll find there are instructions for creating a bootable Lion installer DVD or USB thumb drive as long as you have the Lion Installer on a hard drive. Here are a couple with illustrations:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/21/mac-os-x-lion-clean-install-explained/
http://mashable.com/2011/07/20/lion-clean-install-guide/"

Time Machine won't restore: don't have permission

I am trying to restore a project folder containing website files. It was backed up originally when I was using Leopard and then again after the Snow Leopard upgrade. I need access to the pre-snow leopard files, which are visible in time machine. When I click "restore", however, time machine creates a blank folder and gives me the message: "the operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access [name of file]."
Nothing has changed besides the operating system. The computer and the backup disk are as they have always been. The computer has only one user, so it's not a user conflict. I've reset permissions and restarted. I have tried restoring to several different locations, including the file's original position and the desktop, as well as replacing and keeping both.

Cheryl, How was that Snow Leopard installation performed?
a. Did you simply install SL over Leopard, thus preserving your user data?
b. Did you install SL and create a new user account
c. Did you erase the Macs' HD, install SL, and then Migrate your legacy user account from a Time Machine backup?
Depending on how you perform the upgrade will determine whether you can get at your old data or not. Was there a point after the SL installation that you recall Time Machine popping up a message that the existing backups originated somewhere else but offering you the opportunity to resume current backups to the same set? If so, your legacy user account may ow be inaccessible?
I and others have discovered that once an account has been migrated, both Time Machine and Migration Assistant won't let you recover further data from the old backup set (I intend on filing a Bug Report on this by the way).
However, there is a way around this.
CTRL-Click the Time Machine icon in the Dock and select "Browse Other Time Machine Disks…".
Select your Time Machine backup drive and the 'star field' interface will launch. This approach will allow you to navigate back to the user folder or item you wish to Restore. You will likely be prompted for the username and password of the old account, but you will be able to move the data.
Once the Restore is complete You should be able to now go into this restored folder and change the permissions of the folder or item you are trying to access.
Highlight the file/folder and select Get Info from the File menu.
Click the tiny gold lock icon at the bottom. You will be asked for your current admin username and password. Now click the tiny "+" button on the left. In the resulting window select your current user account and click "Select".
This should have added your current username to the list under Sharing & Permission. Under "Privilege" change "Read only" to "Read & Write". Now, if the item you are dealing with is a folder, then click the tiny Gear icon at the bottom and select "Apply to enclosed items...".
You will be warned that you can't undo this but click OK anyways. When finished close Get Info and you should now have full access to the item in question.
(Make sure that, if it is iLife data you are moving (iPhoto, iTunes, etc), that you have run Software Update and updated your applications. Otherwise, any attempt to import the old data may result in alerts telling that it was created with a newer version.)
Let us know if this resolves your issue. Cheers!

HT201250 Why won't Time Machine won't restore my iphoto library [says there is not enough room on my hard drive.] Any ideas?

I've got 20,000 plus photos on my HD [yes, I know, way tooo many]. I'm trying to clean up by storing them on an external HD, but for several months I've not been able to export iphoto [even geniuses can't figure out why]. So as a work around, I'm trying to export events and albums to external. However, I realized that I didn't export in the original format making the files too small. Now, I just want to restore my iphoto library to the date before I started this process and when I try to restore from Time Machine, it comes up with an error message that I don't have enough room on my HD. Any ideas out there? [The reason I want to restore is because I started to delete some of the iphoto files from my HD to clean it up and I want to get back to the original format for export].

In the simplest sense, archiving a file means making a copy that you never change and never discard. You already know how to do that.
iPhoto has built-in archival features, in the sense that it saves all versions of an image that you've modified. As long as you have adequate backups, you don't necessarily have any reason to archive an iPhoto library. If you want to delete images from the working library but still have access to them in case you change your mind, then you do need to archive those images. I don't have a specific suggestion as to how you should do that. You might post a question in the iPhoto forum.

Mac Crash, Time Machine won't restore different osx?

Hey All,
Yesterday my beloved Mac decided to die in the *** after an OSX update, it was running fine before I put in the dreaded update.
I tired everything possible to get the Mac going again to no avail, so ended up having to put in the origional disk (osx 10.5.6), this worked a treat and got the old girl going again, however when I instructed it to use the time machine to restore, it ran for probably about 5hrs then said it couldn't be performed as the time machine was running a different OSX.
Iv tired to restore it going into the desktop, opening time cap and trying to restore from there - I get the same issue.
Also tired to go into the finder, time machine, data, imac_0023dfa.sparse and selected that and got the same issue - OSX
I have no idea what to do next?
Can I update to 10.6.3 without doing all of the inbetween updates (this is what time was running on)
Driving to an apple store, is a 5 day drive or a 6hr flight... so not really an option.
Please help
Thanks in advance for any advice

Since you have both machines connected why don't you use Migration Assistant to transfer your Home folder? Or you can simply drag your documents from the old computer's connected hard drive.
I hope you realize that Migration Assistant will not transfer your Home folder if you have a new Home folder with the same name. Instead it will create a whole new Home folder with a different name. Have you checked to see if you have two user folders located in your /Users/ folder?

Time Machine won't restore a file

I am able to enter Time Machine and navigate (albeit very slowly) to find the file I want to restore.
I am able to select the file and click "restore." It seems to be dragging the file forward on the screen and then it returns me to the desktop, but the file is nowhere to be found.
OSX 10.9.1
Any ideas on how to get a restore to work?

The file should go to its original directory.. have you done a search?
Try restoring manually.. See Q15 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
There are a whole series of specific instructions for specific types of files.
But sometimes the only way to do it is a full restore to a USB drive as alternative location and then pick the file from there..
You can assume what was easy on previous version of OS will be much harder on Mavericks.. The TM changes have not been for the better.

Time Machine won't restore file in lion - don't have permission

I can't restore files in my document folder now that I upgraded to Lion. I get an error message to the effect you don't have write permission. I'm god **** admin for god sake.

Well I kept on tring to figure out what was going on and I got further.
The problem is on the TM side. The error is saying I (actually my wife because I was loged in in her accout) doesn't have permission to copy the file from the TM drive. When I did a Get Info she had RW and everyone had Read permissions.
The file is the data file for Quicken Essentials. Now this gets crazy to me. She's the one who does Quicken so it was created by her and placed in her Documents folder where TM backed it up. So if anyone should have access it should be her and she is and Admin.
I loged into my account and traversed the TM drive looking for the file. Once found I could drag n drop it to my desktop once I gave my Admin password. I tried doing the same on her account and I still got the same error message.
There are other files my wife can restore from TM just fine. This has got me very nervous about TM. If it can happen to my wife on some file I'm sure it's happening with me on other files that I just don't know about until the time comes.

Time Machine won't back up after system restore

I just restored my system after a failure, and now Time Machine won't back up my hard drive. It gets about 40 out of 90 Gigabytes done, and then gives me an error message that just says that there was an error while backing up, and doesn't give any other information. I ran a Verify Disk with Disk Utility, and there is nothing wrong with the backup drive, and there is more than 200 Gigabytes of space left on that drive.
Thank You.

zhoffmanster wrote:
Ok, so here's the thing: I tried backing up again today, and it worked just fine. Before, what would happen is a message would pop saying "an error has occurred during backup" (or something close to that). The point is, the message didn't give any detail.
No, the point is, you seem to have ignored this:
See the Time Machine - Troubleshooting post at the top of this forum.

After Full System Restore, Time Machine Won't Complete Back Up

I successfully did a full system restore using Time Machine. The Restore worked but Time Machine has not worked since I completed the Restore.
It says "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.." Please help. I don't know what to do. The TM Widget Activity Log is posted below:
Starting standard backup
BStarting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
No pre-backup thinning needed: 529.6 MB requested (including padding), 30.58 GB available
Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying /private/var/CheckUpAgent/data.float.net.sent.ca_history to (null)
Copied 5546 files (34.6 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 526.8 MB requested (including padding), 30.54 GB available
Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying /private/var/CheckUpAgent/data.float.net.sent.ca_history to (null)
Error: (-36) SrcErr:NO Copying /private/var/CheckUpAgent/data.float.net.sent.ca_history to /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Akili Nickson’s iMac/2011-03-17-080109.inProgress/25E02D47-EB07-4E59-B2D8-0A9CF26A0042/Macintos h HD/private/var/CheckUpAgent
Stopping backup.
Error: (-8062) SrcErr:NO Copying /private/var/CheckUpAgent/data.float.net.sent.ca_history to /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/Akili Nickson’s iMac/2011-03-17-080109.inProgress/25E02D47-EB07-4E59-B2D8-0A9CF26A0042/Macintos h HD/private/var/CheckUpAgent
Copied 57 files (23.1 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11

Akili wrote:
Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying /private/var/CheckUpAgent/data.float.net.sent.ca_history
There seems to be a problem with that file. See the blue box in #C3 of [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).
Note that the /private folder is normally hidden, so you'll need to click the +Show inisible items+ box.

Time MAchine won't back up due to not enough space, but there is

TIme Machine won't back up. Displays this:
Actual capacity of the external backup drive is 999.68 GB and available is 135 gb .
The imac internal HD capacity is 999.01GB and used space is 636.321 GB.
This problem has occured periodically in the last 12 months or so, so prior to OS version10.8 install in Jul 2012.
I previously called AppleCare, as I have a contract, and tech said I just need to reformat the external drive and start over.
I did that the last time this happened a few months ago, but I don't like that option, as it eliminates all the prior backups,
What if I needed to try to recover something I deleted 3 weeks ago, for example. I couldn't do so as all backups would have been deleted, of course, by me having refomatted the drive and basically starting over. Also, I noted in another post about a person having a problem due to using a partitioned drive. Mine is not partition, as far as I can tell. See this:
Any ideas? Thanks

The solution is essentially "simple." You need a larger hard drive for these backups or you need to use a different backup solution. By this I mean using backup software that does not preserve an archive of old copies of a file, but simply erases old copies in order to replace them with the new copies. By replacing your backup drive can always accommodate the drive it backs up if it is large enough - say the same size. I can suggest:
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
SuperDuper!
Synk Pro
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
All of the above are capable of being scheduled. Synk Pro makes immediate backups of any changed file on the hard drive. You may configure it to archive changes (like Time Machine) or to delete prior copies.

How to access root apps folder again in Time Machine after a restore?

I just did a Time Machine full system restore which worked, but now it doesn't look like Time Machine is backing up my root level apps folder. All of my root apps were indeed restored, but if I try to go into Time Machine with my (root) Apps folder open, it switches the folder contents to my user apps instead so I don't have access to the root apps in TM. It doesn't appear to be backing them up at the root level anymore either (nothing in the exclusions that would cause this). Any ideas on what happened here? I have just one admin level account on this machine.

cubytus wrote:
Hi everyone,
I just reformated the MacBook hard drive using Extended HFS+, journaled partition to get rid of the case-sensitiveness, which is incompatible with just ONE of my softwares. As such, TM partition is formatted as Extended HFS+, journaled and case-sensitive.
This mis-match is likely to cause trouble in the future. If you have, for example, two files named "FileA" and "filea" in the same folder on the TM drive, and try to restore them to your case-ignorant HD, TM is going to have a problem. I've never tried it, so I can't tell you whether it will overlay the first one it restores with the second, or crash, or what, but it can't be done.
And you may have some of these without realizing it -- if you ever changed a capital to lower-case, or vice-versa, after a file's initial backup, it's a possibility.
Indeed, I checked directly in the Time Machine tree on the external hard drive with Apple+I keys, and 'cubytus' was not listed in the permissions.
No, TM automatically denies everything to everybody, among other things, in it's backups, to keep us mere mortals from messing with them. The original file permissions are kept separately, and TM should restore them along with the files, as they were.
What you're probably seeing is, the user that you're signed-on as won't have those permissions, once TM restores the files. I'd suggest trying the same procedure as your other, or original user -- see if you get the same message.

Spotlight and Time Machine broken after restore/upgrade

I've found a few similar threads to this but none of those solutions has worked for me.
Two things happened at nearly the same time, so I don't exactly know the source of my problem:
I upgraded my old MacBook Pro (approx. Oct 2010, 2.66GHz I think, 300GB-ish HD) from Lion to Mountain Lion
The hard drive on my old MacBook Pro developed a terminal fault, so I had to buy a new one (8GB, 750GB HD) and restore a month-old Time Machine backup from my external drive.
I can't remember whether my last Time Machine backup to my external drive was before or after I upgraded to Mountain Lion.
Now I'm on OS X 10.8.2 on this new machine and I have two problems that seem to co-exist for a lot of other people too:
Spotlight won't index: this is f***ing infuriating, I love spotlight and I use it all the time. When I first restored from the TM backup I think the old index restored with the backup as I did get a decent number of search results (both in spotlight and in MS Outlook), but new files didn't seem to get recognised. I tried adding my hard drive to the exclusion list and removing it again in an attempt to get it to rebuild the index, but all that did was wipe the old index without building a new one, so now I get no spotlight results whatsoever. I tried this solution and sadly it hasn't worked either. Basically I can't search for anything. Even applications (which I like to launch from spotlight) don't appear. All I get is "estimating indexing time", and it never gets any further.
Time Machine won't back up: the first time I tried to backup my new machine it got a few hundred megabytes in before stalling; then a few hundred kilobytes in the next time I tried; and now it just doesn't get anywhere at all. The external drive I'm trying to backup to is recognised fine, I can see all the other files on it, and Time Machine seems to know that it's there, but the backup gets nowhere.
There are reports of this kinds of crap all over the Apple Support forums, but no definitive answer, especially for 10.8.2.
I could really do with some help on this. I need a backup before I screw another laptop, and I need spotlight to survive day-to-day life.
Thanks,
Craig

Hi Craig - I had the exact same problem - I'm using an old early 2009 MacBook Pro upgraded to 8 Gb Ram, 1 TB internal Hitachi HD, 10.8.2 - tried the fixes suggested - got it to work with these steps- everybodies mileage is different but hopefully it works for you as well.
a) I repaired disk permissions with Onyx (free utility) and then started up with Command-R using Disk Utility to repaired/check the Volume (harddisk checked out fine but the volume needed some minor repairs )- Onyx repair disk permission seems to go deeper -had to reinstall some apps - don't know if this solved it-seems to bring it back to the default state - you might get away with doing all from Disk Utility (but starting up with Command-R)
b) restart from my internal hd
c) downloaded the 10.8.2 combo update ( not the incremental shell update or whatever you call it which automatically gets installed with software update - combo update installs everything fresh from the .0 version)
d) with Onyx I deactivated spotlight and erased the spotlight index
d) restart
e) started TM backup - prep took pretty long 30 minutes but then 450 GB got backed up in 6 hours to my external HD which is fast enough for me
f) activated spotlight and 450 Gb were indexed in 9 hours or so
g) for 2 days everything runs fast and very responsive
best,
Franz

Time Machine will not restore backup files.

trying to restore a backup to a new internal hard drive and time machine sees the external hard drive with the backup but no folders. tried a couple of different external hard drives and even installed new OS on the new internal drive. the original OS and the new are both Maverick and after three days of swaping drives and installing fresh installs of maverick and talking to tech support, i'm convinced the issue is in Maverick. anyone have a suggest without buying a third party package like Carbon Copy?

I got something simular. I restored the whole TM backup and the mail messages from august '08 till 15 jan '09 didn't import. I can see them clearly sitting in Time machine but the restore button won't lit up. And I cannot go back in time cause it only ofers me the today option. What to do?
Sakshin.

Time Machine Won't Restore

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