Mac – Trying to restore Time Machine. Lost boot disk

backupdisk-utilityrestoretime-machine

I just bought a new Macbook Air after giving mine to my wife. Before gifting the old laptop I created a Time Machine backup.

Now that I have my new MBAir, I went into Apple+R and chose to restore a Time Machine Backup. Chose my backup, chose the Macintosh HD as the destination drive. It failed.

Now, subsequent attempts have not shown Macintosh HD as a choice for restoration destination. It is also not a choice when trying to choose a start up disk.

However it does show up in Disk Utility.

Boot attempts without holding Apple+R take me to the same OSX Utilities Page.

It seems that I lost my Macintosh HD….

What should I do?

Best Answer

Depending on how old the original MBA is compared to the new one, you probably won't be able to do a bare metal restore.

What you can do, is do a fresh OS install (if not done already) and "Migrate Your Settings" from the Time Machine Backup.

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MacBook – Time machine restore failed to fix boot

It sounds like the file system is damaged. Have you tried running Disk Utility, and selecting 'Repair Disk'?
Restoring from Time Machine will not repair the file system.

MacOS – OS X Yosemite & Time Machine: identity of the backup disk has changed

There seems to be an issue with Yosemite renaming the computer local host by adding (#) after the computer name. There are other reports of this happening in a thread on MacRumors Forum and I believe a few people have blamed this as a cause of time machine backup failures. I've tried a few of the suggestions in the thread but so far none have worked. I've stopped using time machine for now and reverted to an old bash rsync script.

A really simple solution is to open the terminal and type:

rsync -avu ~/ /Volumes/backup_disk/backup_folder

replacing 'backup_disk' with the name of your external hard drive and 'backup_folder' with the name of the backup folder i.e.: 'yosemite_backup'. The three flags -avu mean: archive (a) copy the home directory recursively into sub folders, verbose (v) print to the terminal window everything you are copying (feel free to leave this out) and update (u) will only overwrite files that are newer than the archived file (useful after the initial main backup). This solution isn't as hands off as time machine but at least it's a simple way to back up vital information in Documents and Pictures/Videos.

Edit: 2014/10/28 - I've had success with the following procedure:

Go to Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration and delete the following files:

com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
NetworkInterfaces.plist
preferences.plist

Then remove the numeric iteration (#) from the computer name (or rename altogether) in System Preferences > Sharing and reboot. The plist files will be recreated after reboot. So far this has fixed the computer name issue with Yosemite on my machine and time machine seems to be back on track.

Note: This fix seems to be inconsistent with users and may not fix the naming issue after all.

Edit 2: 2014/11/11 - The above seems to have worked for about 2 weeks but the renaming issue is now back.

Best Answer

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