New Mac didn't restore Time Machine backup

[junkbot]

Hey,

I had an iMac with Mavericks and it broke. I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. I bought a Mac Mini with Yosemite.

After starting my new computer I chose to restore from my Time Machine backup. I made sure everything was checked and chose to transfer everything. Red Flag: the migration assistant went VERY quickly. It then asked me to make a new account—weird—so I did. Afterwards I saw that it only transferred my old account names/icons/passwords with nothing else.

I tried restarting and held command+R to restore from my Time Machine backup but it said I couldn't because it was created on another type of computer. What do I do?

Thanks

 

[mfram]

If you have a new Mac that came with Yosemite installed, then you can't restore Mavericks to it. The best you'd be able to do was to transfer your account settings and apps with Migration Assistant.

But I've found one big caveat with MA. MA will get messed up if you created an account on the new computer and then try to migrate an account with the same name. It's important you let MA create the account on the new machine and you not do it manually. That was my experience anyway. Did you create the account or did you let MA do it?

Maybe the easiest thing is to start over and install the new Mac from scratch and let MA move your account over.