Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is Time Machine restore safe?
- Thread starter alehen
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A restore will accurately bring the system back to the state to which the backup was taken. Now if that state was unstable, and issues with stability, then yes you will probably re-introduce those issues. A way to mitigate that issue is to only restore the data, i.e., certain folders within your home folder.
It worked really well for me. I used it to restore my data from one macbook to a brand new one and it feels as if nothing changed, besides the new laptop being faster obviously.
The only thing I had go wrong was that I made an account on the new macbook before restoring from time machine with the same name as I had on the old macbook. Even though I selected the option in migration assistant to delete the account, I think it kept it anyway.
So now my home folder is named "Kristen 1" instead of just "Kristen" which is minor but kind of annoying lol
So I think that's one thing to look out for, if anything.
The only thing I had go wrong was that I made an account on the new macbook before restoring from time machine with the same name as I had on the old macbook. Even though I selected the option in migration assistant to delete the account, I think it kept it anyway.
So now my home folder is named "Kristen 1" instead of just "Kristen" which is minor but kind of annoying lol
So I think that's one thing to look out for, if anything.
I clean installed Mavericks yesterday night, and I accidentally messed with the main disk partition and decided to reinstalled the system again, so I guess it is safe to restore from time machine.
This can be avoided by using Setup Assistant instead of Migration Assistant,
You only get one chance to use Setup Assistant, which is right at the end of the fresh install process, when it asks you if you want to import from another disk, another Mac or a Time Machine backup, or not at this time.
If you do the import then your original user is imported before any other user is created. If you chose to create a user at the end if the install as you did, and then import with Migration Assistant later, even with the same name it will have a different UUID (probably 502 instead of 501) which can cause permissions problems later.
You can find more on this great Time Machine website. Sadly James Pond died during the test phase of Mavericks.
I have tinkered with this a bit and it only seems to cause issues if the newly made account and the MA imported account have the same name. Then the account imports within itself and causes all sorts of duplicates and problems.
But if you make a new temp account then from that account delete the other account, and run MA from inside the temp account it works fine. You can then login to the real account and delete the temp and be in business.
@Kristinp > If it has not been too long and your old backup has the data you need you may want to do this.
Doing this certainly avoids the suffix -1 on the new account name, but the new account will have UUID 502 or higher. This can cause problems. See the pink boxed section on this link.
No it won't. I have tested it. Read the article you linked and it explains how adding a temp account then deleting the "real" account and reimporting fixes this. It is explained in section 4 of the article.
Fair comment...I prefer to avoid the problem rather than create it then fix it, so I hadn't read that far. I have never come across a reason to use Migration Assistant instead of Setup Assistant but I guess there are situations.
Oh I agree... I am not all suggesting running MA after is best. But about twice a week I see a user on here that did and they have this problem, and the process I described seems to fix it up okay.
