Upgrading from 10.6 to 10.11 in old MBP? and timemachine issue

[esc123]

Hi,

This is my first post to these forums. I have just recently suffered a hard drive failure on my old Macbook Pro (Mid 2010) 13". I installed a new hard drive and then installed 10.6.3 from the osx install cd that came with the machine.

I was using time machine as a backup for my previous hard drive and tried to restore my data but for reasons unknown to me it wouldn't work as the option to restore on the time machine interface was unavailable.

I then downloaded and installed 10.6.8 thinking that time machine may work in a more recent version of osx. Again time machine was not giving me the option to restore the files from my external backup.

At that stage i switched to migration assistant. When going through the set up of migration assistant the only hard drive available to select was not the external hard drive with the backup files but my newly installed HDD. I looked through the forums to try and get an answer to this problem and I read that migration assistant requires you to select the hard drive you want to put the backed up files on to. So i selected my internal hard drive and let migration assist do its thing.

When all was finished I checked to see if my files from the external backup were transferred. Unfortunately nothing seemed to have happened only a few folders from my user accounts on my previous HDD were visible on my new HDD but not accessible as I "don’t have permission to see its contents."

So I have two questions:

1) How do I get my files out of my time machine backup?
Note: I can't exactly remember what version of OSX was used when making the time machine backup

2) Should I update my MBP to the newest version of OSX considering the age of it and relatively low spec (4gb ram, no SSD etc.)?


Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Ebenezum]

I suspect the Time Machine backup has damaged filesystem, it would explain why it didn't show up in the restore nor in migration assistant.

If the backup was made with later OS version (10.7+) migration assistant is unlikely to recognise it and you might have to resort to option 1.

Just to clarify, the backup was when Macbook had 10.6.8 installed?
In that case you have some options:

1. Manually copy everything to correct folders from the backup. It can be a daunting task if you aren't certain which folders are important.

2. You could try repairing the backup with Disk Utility. It may not work if filesystem is too badly damaged and you might need to purchase repair software (Diskwarrior, Techtool Pro etc.) OR take Mac to service. If the repair succeeds you should be able to use migration assistant to restore the data.


As for El Capitan it will work with your Mac with these caveats: 1. Software may not be compatible. 2. Mac is unlikely to be as fast as since El Capitan is more demanding. 3. Depending on your usage there could be too many downsides (bugs, missing features etc.) compared to 10.6.8.