Mac – Time Machine – An error occurred while restoring from the backup

backuperrorrestoretime-machine

Having some trouble restoring a Time Machine backup. After some initial disk problems we had to reinstall OSX and this is what has been done thus far:

  1. Booted into Internet Recovery Mode (Command (⌘) – Option (⌥) – R)
  2. Reinstalled OSX
  3. Rebooted and into Recovery Mode (Option (⌥) – R)
  4. Selected to Restore from the Time Machine Backup
  5. Restore goes fine for 6+ hours (91%) and then fails with the message, "An error occurred while restoring from the backup. Restart your computer, and then try again"
  6. I tried an older backup from the same sparse bundle but having the same problem.

I have tried this three times but it fails in the same location each time. Any suggestions at this point would be Welcome.

Best Answer

Basically you have to explore what's going wrong and fix it manually.

Hope this helps:

Inspect the installer 'Log' and if you have a 'Critical failure' pertaining to a particular folder(s), proceed with these steps:

  • Connect your backup to a working Mac (or fresh install MacOS on the Mac you're trying to restore to)

  • Open Terminal and mount the Time Capsule's sparse bundle (if using a Capsule rather than a USB/network drive).

  • In Terminal, use TMSafetyNet.kext to remove the troublesome folders one by one.

  • Return to Recovery Mode on the target machine and restore with the fixed backup.

Source: my blogpost, updated as MacOS updates

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