New boot drive - restoring from Time Machine

[beaster]

Background: I have a iMac running the latest Snow Leopard with a 750 GB external USB drive that I use to store all my media files. I also have a second 1 TB external drive dedicated to Time Machine backups, configured to backup both the internal boot drive and the external media drive. On the internal drive I only had about 40 GB of data.

Today I replaced the internal drive with an SSD. I booted from the Snow Leopard CD and formatted the SSD. I connected the Time Machine backup drive, but not the media drive. I went to "restore system from backup", but it said I didn't have enough room. Presumably because it wants to restore the *entire* TM backup, including all my media files, but only sees the small SSD as a target. I could plug in the media drive, but I don't want or need all those files restored, since 1) they're sitting there undisturbed on the media drive and 2) I don't want to run the risk of trying to overwrite them with the files on the backup and discovering the backup has a corruption, etc.

Is there a way to "restore from time machine backup" selectively? Or is the right answer to do a clean SL install and then use Migration Assistant selectively?

Thanks,
Sean

 

[MacForScience]

Background: I have a iMac running the latest Snow Leopard with a 750 GB external USB drive that I use to store all my media files. I also have a second 1 TB external drive dedicated to Time Machine backups, configured to backup both the internal boot drive and the external media drive. On the internal drive I only had about 40 GB of data.

Today I replaced the internal drive with an SSD. I booted from the Snow Leopard CD and formatted the SSD. I connected the Time Machine backup drive, but not the media drive. I went to "restore system from backup", but it said I didn't have enough room. Presumably because it wants to restore the *entire* TM backup, including all my media files, but only sees the small SSD as a target. I could plug in the media drive, but I don't want or need all those files restored, since 1) they're sitting there undisturbed on the media drive and 2) I don't want to run the risk of trying to overwrite them with the files on the backup and discovering the backup has a corruption, etc.

Is there a way to "restore from time machine backup" selectively? Or is the right answer to do a clean SL install and then use Migration Assistant selectively?

Thanks,
Sean

I would do the latter. It gives you the opportunity to make sure you only get back what you need and will ensure a more stable system in the long-run.

Cheers

 

[subjonas]

Sorry to revive a 9 year old thread, but the op had the exact same question I have. If you have an internal system drive and an external storage drive, both backed up to time machine, and you replace only the internal system drive, is the most straightforward way to restore the internal system drive from a backup to also restore the external, even though it doesn’t need to be restored?? That just doesn’t sound efficient. I must be missing something. The fresh os install with manual selective data migration sounds more like a workaround to me.

 

[Brian33]

I looked on my Mojave system, and it looks to me like the "Reinstall macOS" option in Recovery Mode will only restore your system volume (normally your internal drive). There appears to be no way from that screen to restore other volumes (e.g., external disk drives/partitions) that were backed up along with the system volume. Presumably you are intended to restore these extra volumes after you've booted up with the newly-restored system volume by using the usual Time Machine interface.

My TM backup includes one internal (boot) volume and several external drive volumes. Booting to recovery mode and selecting "Reinstall macOS" eventually gets you to the screen I show below. The drop-down labeled "Restore From:" is disabled/grayed out (i.e., I can't select anything else), I think because I had backups of only one bootable system volume. (One could have bootable macOSes on external volumes included in the same TM backup, and I guess they would show up here, but that's an unusal case.)

Note that my machine name is "imac" and my internal system volume is named "imac-boot". Most people's "Restore From" selection would read "Macintosh HD on <machinename>".

 

[subjonas]

I looked on my Mojave system, and it looks to me like the "Reinstall macOS" option in Recovery Mode will only restore your system volume (normally your internal drive). There appears to be no way from that screen to restore other volumes (e.g., external disk drives/partitions) that were backed up along with the system volume. Presumably you are intended to restore these extra volumes after you've booted up with the newly-restored system volume by using the usual Time Machine interface.

My TM backup includes one internal (boot) volume and several external drive volumes. Booting to recovery mode and selecting "Reinstall macOS" eventually gets you to the screen I show below. The drop-down labeled "Restore From:" is disabled/grayed out (i.e., I can't select anything else), I think because I had backups of only one bootable system volume. (One could have bootable macOSes on external volumes included in the same TM backup, and I guess they would show up here, but that's an unusal case.)

Note that my machine name is "imac" and my internal system volume is named "imac-boot". Most people's "Restore From" selection would read "Macintosh HD on <machinename>".

Thanks for checking into that. I’m a bit confused though. First, it was my understanding that only choosing “restore from time machine backup” in the macOS utilities window would get you to the screen in your screenshot, and that choosing “reinstall macOS” restores the os from the internet from scratch. Do you remember the options you saw after you chose “reinstall macOS”? I haven’t actually done this process yet.
Also the issue OP had was that when restoring the internal boot drive, it would try to cram the entire backup (from both the previous internal boot drive and an external storage drive) onto the new internal boot drive. Are you saying that choosing the “reinstall macOS” option and then (somehow) choosing to restore from a time machine backup from there will extract only the backup of the internal boot drive to restore to the new replacement drive?

 

[Brian33]

I’m sorry, I made a mistake in my posting. I had actually chosen “restore from time machine backup”.

I did not actually do the restore, but I don’t think I would have gotten the disk space problem because the Restore From field specified a single volume, not all volumes in the backup. But I could well be wrong!

 

[subjonas]

I’m sorry, I made a mistake in my posting. I had actually chosen “restore from time machine backup”.

I did not actually do the restore, but I don’t think I would have gotten the disk space problem because the Restore From field specified a single volume, not all volumes in the backup. But I could well be wrong!

Oh ok. Yeah that does seem to indicate it will only restore the boot drive and not the external data. That would make sense. Curious what the OP’s issue was then. Maybe he/she had more data on the boot drive than he/she thought.