Restore time machine to older iMac

[thewright1]

Hi all,

I have a bit of a situation here. I have a newer iMac running snow leopard. I backed it up with time machine and I want to restore that data onto my other iMac (both are aluminum) but the one I want to restore to is an older model aluminum. I installed a brand new hard drive on the iMac and I'm using my install discs that it came with but when I went to Utilities, I didn't see the option to restore. Is this because I'm trying to restore to an older iMac or is it because the newer iMac was backed up on snow leopard? I see a lot of questions of people doing this in reverse, but not necessarily from a new computer to an older one. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

 

[elithrar]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

If the older machine is running an older OS that doesn't allow restoration from TM (i.e. 10.4 Tiger) then you won't be able to restore, unless you have a plain-Jane Snow Leopard disk.

 

[thewright1]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

If the older machine is running an older OS that doesn't allow restoration from TM (i.e. 10.4 Tiger) then you won't be able to restore, unless you have a plain-Jane Snow Leopard disk.

Got it, I'll install like normal first, then update with snow leopard, then restore. That should do it right?

 

[Bear]

Got it, I'll install like normal first, then update with snow leopard, then restore. That should do it right?

Yes that should do it. Also since the back up is from a Snow Leopard machine, this will eliminate any issues that restoring to an older OS might cause.