Restore Time Machine State After Clean Install?

[moonchilddave]

I've done a clean install of Lion after backing everything up to an external drive. When I go to my Time Machine prefs and select my Time Capsule disk, it doesn't say there are any backups - but I can see them by mounting the sparsebundle.. Is there a preference file I need to copy from my external backup disk to restore my Time Machine to the state it was in before the clean install?

 

[robgendreau]

Ah, one of the perils of going with a clean install.

Your backup thinks you deleted everything cuz you did. With Lion you should be able to resume your Time Machine backups where you left off, but I don't think YOU can because of the clean install, at least just by turning Time Machine on.

The good news is that it's all there. So you can manually restore stuff. Or fire up migration ass't to bring stuff over.

But if you intent is to simply back up the new Lion stuff, check out this Macworld article: http://www.macworld.com/article/161421/2011/07/migrate_time_machine_backup_to_new_mac_in_lion.html

I didn't try because I wanted to keep the SL backup in case I went back, but it might work for you.

Rob

 

[moonchilddave]

I don't entirely trust doing a Migration Assist - part of the reason for the clean install. I've gotten most everything back, but when it comes to restoring my Mail to the state it was in, I have fail... I was hoping if I could get Time Machine back to where it was I could get my Mail back to it's previous state.

So, I guess if someone could tell me everything I need to copy over to get my Mail back the way it was, that would also help.