MacOS – How to restore system from network drive

macosNetworkrecoveryrestoretime-machine

I have a 2014 MacBook Pro.

I want to restore my OS from a Time Machine backup which is on a shared network volume.

When I restart in recovery (Apple-Opt-R), it boots from internet, but if I try to restore from Time Machine backup, it fails to see the server where the shared volume is.

Do I need to log/mount the share somehow?

Best Answer

UPDATE: On recent versions of macOS (tested with High Sierra 10.13.4) you can restore from a networked drive directly from the "Restore from Time Machine Backup" option in the recovery mode. The following steps are not required (but are super awesome!).

Prerequisites:

– admin account & password
– AFP/SMB-share & server IP-address

  1. Boot the Computer to Recovery Mode.
  2. Open Terminal in the Utilities menu
  3. At the prompt enter: cd /Volumes
  4. Create a sub-directory in Volumes as a mount point for your time machine share:
    mkdir TimeMachine
  5. Enter cd TimeMachine
  6. Enter pwd. pwd should show /Volumes/TimeMachine

  7. Mount the network share with your admin loginname & password:

    mount -t afp afp://adminname:password@ServerIPAddress/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

    If your password contains wonky characters like :@\/ use URL encoding to protect them

  8. Enter: ls -la. Note the exact name of your sparsebundle.
  9. Enter: hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/NameOfYourSparseBundle. You may enter the first letters of the sparsebundle name and then hit TAB. Hitting tab should auto-complete the Time Machine sparsebundle name. It may not look the same as above as it escapes spaces and special characters.
  10. After auto-completing the name, hit return. If you return to the prompt the sparsebundle has been opened.

  11. Enter exit and ⏎ and quit Terminal.
    Example steps 3-11:

    enter image description here

  12. Select Restore From Time Machine Backup and click Continue.

    enter image description here

  13. After a search it should show you the Time Machine Backups directory as a volume that contains your backup. Select that (in my example 'Time Machine Backups') and click Continue.

    enter image description here

  14. In the next screen you will see all the backups that you can restore from listed by time and date.

    enter image description here

  15. Select the backup you want to restore and continue and finally choose your destination disk:

    enter image description here

Related Question