Restoring to Mountain Lion.

[Nikunj93]

Hey guys!
I am using mac from the past one year but sadly, I am still a mac newbie So, I need your help.
I had Sleopard when I got my early 11 MBP and upgraded to Lion with the free up to date program. Since then my mac has been acting like an old Windows pc with impotent hardware, hanging every now and then, freezing, super slow.
So, Mountain Lion was a blessing! I did a clean install of it on my Startup drive using guides available.
I had prior to installing Mlion, made a new partion of my HDD (320GB) and used that to take a time machine backup of my drive. The backup is there, and I can access those files even now using finder.

Now, I want to restore my files (images, music etc) as well as some apps but nothing that will cause the old problems to come back. I can use Migration Assistant to restore the user files easily I know, but user account names are different so will it work fine and restore everything to its proper place?

Also, if I start time machine ie enable it, and select the same partition where my old backup is (of the lion install) what exactly will happen? will it overwrite that? create new folder or what..

How do I restore specific apps? I can copy paste from Finder, but is that the right way?

Those are few questions I'd be glad if I get some advice on. Basically it comes to restoring data from an old install in such a way which does not bring old problems back.

Thanks!!

 

[eagandale4114]

Hey guys!
I am using mac from the past one year but sadly, I am still a mac newbie So, I need your help.
I had Sleopard when I got my early 11 MBP and upgraded to Lion with the free up to date program. Since then my mac has been acting like an old Windows pc with impotent hardware, hanging every now and then, freezing, super slow.
So, Mountain Lion was a blessing! I did a clean install of it on my Startup drive using guides available.
I had prior to installing Mlion, made a new partion of my HDD (320GB) and used that to take a time machine backup of my drive. The backup is there, and I can access those files even now using finder.

Now, I want to restore my files (images, music etc) as well as some apps but nothing that will cause the old problems to come back. I can use Migration Assistant to restore the user files easily I know, but user account names are different so will it work fine and restore everything to its proper place?

Also, if I start time machine ie enable it, and select the same partition where my old backup is (of the lion install) what exactly will happen? will it overwrite that? create new folder or what..

How do I restore specific apps? I can copy paste from Finder, but is that the right way?

Those are few questions I'd be glad if I get some advice on. Basically it comes to restoring data from an old install in such a way which does not bring old problems back.

Thanks!!

Dont copy paste apps. Some wont work. Redownload and reinstall. Or for stuff like iLife reinstall from CD. Dont use migration assistant. Over on the ML forum there are countless stories of people who upgraded then used time machine/ migration assistant to move data and have had problems. Essentially you will be copying all the stuff that slowed Lion down. Manually copy and paste the stuff. I know it takes time but it is worth it. My 2011 runs far better because I clean installed and then manually migrated. Use finder to copy paste files, not apps.

 

[Nikunj93]

Dont copy paste apps. Some wont work. Redownload and reinstall. Or for stuff like iLife reinstall from CD. Dont use migration assistant. Over on the ML forum there are countless stories of people who upgraded then used time machine/ migration assistant to move data and have had problems. Essentially you will be copying all the stuff that slowed Lion down. Manually copy and paste the stuff. I know it takes time but it is worth it. My 2011 runs far better because I clean installed and then manually migrated. Use finder to copy paste files, not apps.

Okay thanks a lot!
But you skipped just one q, would appreciate if you could answer that:
What about my old Time Machine Backup and enabling time machine in that same partition where my current backup is? What will it do? Simply create another backup? If yes, how do I merge them/remove old backup?

 

[Weaselboy]

Okay thanks a lot!
But you skipped just one q, would appreciate if you could answer that:
What about my old Time Machine Backup and enabling time machine in that same partition where my current backup is? What will it do? Simply create another backup? If yes, how do I merge them/remove old backup?

You will get a popup that asks what you want to do... merge and keep going... or create a new backup.

If you create a new one (this is what I would do). Give it week to make sure things are okay then go to the Time Machine disk in the Finder and just delete the old backup set.

 

[Nikunj93]

You will get a popup that asks what you want to do... merge and keep going... or create a new backup.

If you create a new one (this is what I would do). Give it week to make sure things are okay then go to the Time Machine disk in the Finder and just delete the old backup set.

well i did not get any option as such...But I still turned it on. it's backing up right now...I'll give the final result in a 15 minutes or so.

No Dude! Whatever you said DID NOT WORK.
It removed some old backups, and merged current backup with the old one. I did not get any option to choose and it merged right away :|
Now how do I prevent one or two of my old backup's to be deleted the next time TM takes a new backup..

 

[boto]

Carbon Copy Cloner works perfectly to migrate all of your data to Mountain Lion. The only apps that I encountered that had several errors were Adobe CS6 and Little Snitch, in terms of my applications at least, otherwise all of the licenses and information were working properly. There is no delay in bootup or shutdown times, except after restarting from the migration assistant process. I never use Time Machine anymore because it seemed less reliable and I always came across problems because not ALL of my files were backed up, although I do use it for my Time Capsule to access certain files in case I accidentally lose it or delete it.

 

[Weaselboy]

well i did not get any option as such...But I still turned it on. it's backing up right now...I'll give the final result in a 15 minutes or so.

No Dude! Whatever you said DID NOT WORK.
It removed some old backups, and merged current backup with the old one. I did not get any option to choose and it merged right away :|
Now how do I prevent one or two of my old backup's to be deleted the next time TM takes a new backup..

I don't know what to tell you. I just updated to ML when it came out and I got asked when I selected the backup disk.

TM will delete oldest data first, but if you have documents for example on the current machine and they are in the backup set, they won't get deleted.

 

[Nikunj93]

the time machine settings say 24 hourly backups..weekly backups for longest period etc.
and it deletes backup when disk gets full. my partition where I have chose TM is around 200 GB. So will it take up the entire 200 GB? and then start deleting?

 

[Weaselboy]

the time machine settings say 24 hourly backups..weekly backups for longest period etc.
and it deletes backup when disk gets full. my partition where I have chose TM is around 200 GB. So will it take up the entire 200 GB? and then start deleting?

That is correct. It will fill the entire 200GB and then start deleting the oldest versions of files. The version part is the key here. If you have a full Time Machine backup set it will always have a complete backup of everything that is now on your disk. If the backup disk gets full what gets deleted is older versions of what is now on your disk, never the current version.

For example, if you have a 500MB photo that you had edited once a day for ten days, Time Machine would have ten 500MB copies of that photo because it saved each version. So if the disk gets full it will start by deleting the version from ten days ago, so just that one (in my example) would no longer be available to restore... but the current version would always still be there.

 

[Nikunj93]

ok the current version would be there.
Now, If I have month old file which I do NOT have currently, what will TM do? Delete it when disk space fills?

how do I prevent taking it the entire 200 GB? Resize partiiton?

 

[Nikunj93]

Edit: I have another bugging issue.
I had this problem in Lion too, thought it would be fixed if I cleaned install (was lazy to do so), now cleaned install MLion after a year, still the same problem.
If I leave my laptop to sleep mode, then when I wake it up again, it will never connect to my wifi network!
A) I HAVE TO HAVE reboot my router
B) I HAVE to restart my macbook pro.
to fix this and to make it able to connect to my hotspot again. nothing else seems to fix it.

 

[Weaselboy]

ok the current version would be there.
Now, If I have month old file which I do NOT have currently, what will TM do? Delete it when disk space fills?

how do I prevent taking it the entire 200 GB? Resize partiiton?

If there is a month old file in the backup set, and that file is no longer on your computer, then yes that would be a file on the sort list for purging when the backup disk gets full.

Yes, resizing the partition would be the way to do that. Be aware though that it is a good idea to have a backup disk 50% or even 100% larger than the total data on your computer to allow room for the versions we talked about.

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Edit: I have another bugging issue.
I had this problem in Lion too, thought it would be fixed if I cleaned install (was lazy to do so), now cleaned install MLion after a year, still the same problem.
If I leave my laptop to sleep mode, then when I wake it up again, it will never connect to my wifi network!
A) I HAVE TO HAVE reboot my router
B) I HAVE to restart my macbook pro.
to fix this and to make it able to connect to my hotspot again. nothing else seems to fix it.

Don't know. I have seen some other threads on this going back to Lion even.