1

I tried to upgrade a MacBook Air from macOS Sierra to macOS High Sierra. It rebooted and entered a black screen while the machine got very hot for about 30 minutes. I ended up turning off the machine and my drive was no longer bootable.

Before I did this, I made sure I had two backups on our macOS Sierra Server, configured with the Time Machine Server. We have a two Drobos attached to the server and our Macs backup to each Drobo in round-robin fashion.

I also did a "Backup with Consistency Check" on each of the two drives and I did a "Verify Backups" and all was fine.

Since I could not longer boot the MacBook Air and I was sure I had two good backups, I wiped the Mac and installed macOS High Sierra from the recovery partition. It installed fine.

However, at the point where it asks if I wanted to transfer from a backup, I chose that option but macOS won't find the backups. I waited 8 hours, and still it didn't find them.

So, I chose "Other Location" and I specified the server and SMB share name, and it added it but then said the share was unavailable. I don't have the exact error messages with me, and I'll update my question later with the exact errors and possibly screenshots.

I completed the macOS High Sierra installed, mounted and authenticated to the Time Machine server, and accessed the Time Machine backup sparsebundle. Then I launched the Migration Assistant. Again, it did not find the backups. Plus, if I add them, I get the same error (I will provide later).

How can I restore my MacBook Air from a Time Machine server backup?

Improve this question
0

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

I ended up calling Apple support and they apparently don't know to restore a Time Machine backup from a Time Machine server either. So I took matters into my own hand:

  1. Copied sparesebundle from TM server to USB drive.
  2. Attached USB drive directly to MacBook Air.
  3. Mounted sparsebundle and started Migration Assistant.
  4. Restore the data.

At first I tried to restore without mounting the sparsebundle and wile the computer name from the backup file will show, no backups show. You must mount the sparsebundle.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thats what I was just about to tell you to do.
    – Maximus
    Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 15:27
0

You may need your Macbook to "inherit" the older backups if TM believes this is now a different machine, e.g. if its drive-name got changed during the broken HS install attempt or for whatever other reason. A terminal command, tmutil, can do a bunch of magic on TM volumes (or, as the Sorcerer's Apprentice found out, a bunch of shenanigans as well! Read carefully and work slowly.)

Here is an article about inheriting a backup set TM doesn't otherwise believe belongs to this machine.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .