How to Properly Restore from a Time Machine Backup | Mac Tips

Just got your Mac repaired by Apple and they've wiped out the hard drive? In this guide we walk you through how to fully restore your time machine backup.

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RESTORE When you receive your new or repaired Mac from Apple it boots straight into the macOS setup screens, while this does provide an option for restoring from Time Machine, it doesn't actually do it. What it does instead is copy select files and folders from your backup over to your new machine.

What you want to do instead is restart the Mac into Recovery mode, but holding down the Command and R keys on boot. Once inside select the Restore from Time Machine option and that will do a complete wipe of your system and restore all the data from the backup.

If you're planning on restoring from a NAS drive make sure you have the cable plugged in or WIFI turned on so it can be detected. I sometimes run into errors where the NAS drive reports the Time Machine folder is being used by another computer, to get around this I just give it a restart to help it release any old cached handles.

Restoring from a Time Machine backup can take a while. For me and my 1TB of data it ranges from 4 hours to over a day and a half, depending on if I'm restoring from a USB-C SSD drive or a network drive.

PROBLEMS Sometimes macOS won't let you fully restore from an old Time Machine backup from another computer. In this case you'll need to manually open up the Time Machine backup archive and restore the files the traditional macOS setup misses yourself. If you're interested in an advanced guide for this operational, just let me know.

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