Mac – Time machine full restore only shows “complete backups”

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I am doing a restore of a Time machine backup to a new hard drive. The latest backup was completed on Feb 1, but I was very surprised to see that OS X Installer restore utility only lets me restore from "full backups" and the latest full backup was done Jan 15.

First, I thought every Time Machine backup was full backup. Time Machine never reported any errors or any indication it was not doing complete backups. What happened and how can I prevent this from happening in the future?

Second, once I have completed the restore of the full backup from Jan 15th, what is the proper procedure to update to the latest backup on Feb 1st. Can I just restore all the files in the user's home directory?

Best Answer

It appears that you disabled backing up system files by dragging /System directory to ignore list. "Full backup" means that OS X files are also backed up. It seems that in your case they are not, so you cannot restore the system from this backup.

Your way to go now is:

  • Backup the last time if you still can
  • Boot to Internet recovery if your Mac has it (if not, update EFI to get Internet recovery) or from disks that came with your Mac (if you have them)
  • Reformat the disk, keep "Macintosh HD" name
  • Install a fresh copy of OS using Internet recovery or disks
  • Internet Recovery will give you the same version of OS X as your Mac originally had. If it is not Mavericks, get Mavericks from the AppStore, make a bootable drive (google for it, it is easy), boot the drive, reformat the disk again and install fresh Mavericks.
  • On the last step of the installation you will be asked to migrate your files. Do that.

This way you will get a fresh copy of the system with all your files from the last backup.

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