More Details on Copying Lion Install Back to your Mac
To restore your copy of the Lion backup from an external drive called Azure, and from a directory on that drive called Lion:
1. Bring up a terminal window and type the following commands:
cd /Applications
mkdir Lion
cd /Volumes/Azure/Lion
find . -print | cpio -pmdv /Applications/Lion
2. This will take a few minutes. Wait until it is complete.
3. You may close the terminal window now.
4. In the finder, navigate to /Applications
5. Change the name of the directory, Lion (that you just created and moved 3.7GB of files into) to Install Mac OS X Lion.app
The command "find . -print" spits out a list of all directories and files visible from the directory in which this is executed. The vertical bar (called "pipe") sends that to the next command on the line. The command cpio is a handy, general purpose directory compacter and mover. The options do the following:
- p "pass" This means to pass the files from one place (where you execute the command) to another place (the final argument to the command)
- m This means to maintain the modification dates of the files. This might be optional, but I'm just in the habit of using it all of the time so that things like my iTunes music maintains its dates, etc.
- d This means that a directory is expected as the final argument for where to pass the files to
-v "verbose" This means to list all of the directories and files on stderr, which, in this case, is the terminal window. This actually isn't necessary, but seeing the file names blow by gives me a nice warm feeling that cpio is actually doing something.
If you do this correctly, the permissions of the resulting .app directory should be correct. But, in the event that they are not (it isn't executable by you) then change the name back to something without any spaces in it (such as Lion), bring up a terminal window, navigate to the directory that it (cd /Applications) and type chmod -R 777 Lion, which will set the read, write and execute bits for everyone on your Mac. Then close the terminal window, bring up the Finder, navigate to /Applications and change the name of Lion back to Install Mac OS X Lion.app.
To install Lion: from the bar at the bottom of the screen, click on Applications (towards the right) and click on the Lion icon to install Lion onto the Mac.
