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jkaz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 3, 2004
386
2
Upper Mid West
Hello,

My mavericks machine is an iMac from 2008. My 10.8 machine is a MBP from 2008.

I've never used time machine before.

I dove headfirst into mavericks on my iMac and have not enjoyed my experience.

Every morning when I wake up I have to open activitiy monitor(actually I just always leave it open) and kill system stats and mds. (perhaps i am doing something wrong, but i digress)

I've never done time machine backups before and I've never had a reason to 'unupgrade' my os, so I left myself in a situation that I didn't prepare for.

What I think I can do is backup both my laptop(10.8) and my iMac(10.9) to time machine then restore my iMac to the backup of my laptop.

If there is a problem I would restore my iMac from its own time machine.

Is this really as simple as it sounds? Will this work like I think it will? Are there any pitfalls I need to look out for? What if my iMac was 2013, would it still work?

I realize that I am essentially deleting my entire iMac, but almost everything is identical on the two computers as far as software goes(my MBP has a few more apps which I would love to utilize on my iMac). Also, nearly 100% of my work files are always on a pocket hard drive.

I appreciate any input and advice.

Thanks!

j
 

jbarley

macrumors 601
Jul 1, 2006
4,023
1,893
Vancouver Island
here is something you could try...
connect your MBP and iMac together with a FW cable,
boot the MBP into target disk mode (press the 'T' key) on startup.
Now boot your iMac while holding the 'alt' key and your MBP should show up as a startup disk option.
Select the MBP and see how well the iMac starts and runs off of the MBP's HDD, if you like what you get, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the MBP to your iMacs startup drive.
 

ultraspiracle

macrumors member
Sep 21, 2012
93
4
You can't restore to ML with time machine alone.

You'll need to format and then install the release version of ML from the apple downloads page.

To accomplish this you'll need to create a bootable OS X version on a portable external drive, THEN, use migration assistant to restore your apps, settings, etc from Time Machine. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4500

I've done this twice - it actually works pretty well.
 

janitor3

macrumors regular
Aug 11, 2010
227
41
Glasgow, Scotland
You can't restore to ML with time machine alone.

I have restored to ML from Mavericks using a time machine backup, didn't have any problems.
I had updated to Mavericks and found it glitchy, so I restored back to ML from my backups on time machine.
 

Gochugogi

macrumors regular
Oct 27, 2013
223
26
Sandwich Isles
You can't restore to ML with time machine alone.

You'll need to format and then install the release version of ML from the apple downloads page.

To accomplish this you'll need to create a bootable OS X version on a portable external drive, THEN, use migration assistant to restore your apps, settings, etc from Time Machine. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4500

I've done this twice - it actually works pretty well.

I did the same thing so I could run both ML and Mavericks on my Mac Pro, but used a spare internal drive. It takes all afternoon so set aside a big block of time. Some pro apps will need to be validated...
 

ultraspiracle

macrumors member
Sep 21, 2012
93
4
You can't restore to ML with time machine alone.

I have restored to ML from Mavericks using a time machine backup, didn't have any problems.
I had updated to Mavericks and found it glitchy, so I restored back to ML from my backups on time machine.

Hi Janitor3 - Really? I didn't think you could do that..I know I could not go back to Lion from ML using Time Machine but maybe Mavs to ML is different?
 
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