Restoring from Time Machine to an external drive

I had an iMac with an external thunderbolt drive called "pictures" both backed up, using time machine, to a NAS. Long story short, the iMac and thunderbolt drive were stolen, but the NAS was not.

I purchased a new iMac and a new external USB drive. When I restore from the time machine backup on the NAS, it only restores the iMac internal drive, not the external drive. I am currently running OS Mojave.

How do I make time machine restore to the new external drive?

I have called Apple customer support about this three times, but they cannot seem to wrap their head around the situation and have proposed several solutions that do not work.

I would greatly appreciate any help. Please let me know if you need more detailed information about my setup.

Thank you!

alaska_tim said:

I had an iMac with an external thunderbolt drive called "pictures" both backed up, using time machine, to a NAS. Long story short, the iMac and thunderbolt drive were stolen, but the NAS was not.

I purchased a new iMac and a new external USB drive. When I restore from the time machine backup on the NAS, it only restores the iMac internal drive, not the external drive. I am currently running OS Mojave.

How do I make time machine restore to the new external drive?

I have called Apple customer support about this three times, but they cannot seem to wrap their head around the situation and have proposed several solutions that do not work.

I would greatly appreciate any help. Please let me know if you need more detailed information about my setup.

Thank you!

Click to expand...

I believe these methods still work: https://www.macworld.com/article/3429369/find-an-external-drive-backed-up-to-time-machine.html

You can probably do it using tmutil from the command line. “man tmutil” for syntax, or there is a description here: https://ss64.com/osx/tmutil.html

I can't help you with "this time", because I've never used time machine once and never will.

But I CAN help you with NEXT time.
Next time, to backup an EXTERNAL drive, DO NOT use time machine.

Instead, use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.
Either one will create a 100% EXACT COPY of the original drive.
If the source drive fails, you don't even need to "restore" anywhere.
Just plug in the backup and use that instead, because for all practical purposes, it IS "the source drive".

If you had done this, you'd be enjoying those pictures right now.

(1) Once you have restored the (internal) boot drive on your new Mac, simply go to the right side of the menubar where the TM icon sits and select 'Enter Time Machine'. This, of course, requires that your new Mac already considers the NAS as the Time Machine destination, which might happen automatically when you restore the boot drive from the NAS otherwise you might need to set the NAS as the/a TM destination.

In the TM interface, you should be able to browse all TM backups stored on the NAS, including those of the external drive. Select a point in the past from which you want to restore things. Then, navigate to the 'root of the file system', ie, where you can select the name of the external drive. (Or do these two things in reverse order.) After that, do a right-click or use the gear icon in the 'Finder' toolbar to choose 'Restore' which should probably prompt you with a question where to restore to.

(2) Alternatively, you can mount the TM backup on the NAS directly in the Finder and navigate to the backup of the external drive there and restore it simply via drag & drop.

(3) Method (1) can also be done via the command line using tmutil but if you are not familiar with this tool, using the TM GUI interface might be easier.

Thank you for the suggestion. For the time being, the new iMac has a large enough internal drive to hold my photo library, which was not the case on the old computer. Once this library outgrows my storage capacity, and I will do something similar. What I'd like is a system that backs up the entire hard drive to the NAS, then selectively backs up the photo library to the cloud.

Thank you everyone! I was able to recover the files. I cannot tell you what a huge relief this was! I have over 75,000 photos spanning the past 15 years, that I was worried were lost.

I ended up going through the file browser. For some reason, while the NAS mounts when I turn on the computer, the Time Machine disk image (computer_name.sparsebundle) needs to be manually mounted. This often gives an error that the drive in unaccessible, but with repeat attempts this eventually worked for reasons that are unclear to me. This was pretty nerve wracking, as I couldn't tell if the file was corrupted, or if there was some network issue.

Navigating through Time Machine was a dead end. I suspect this is because the physical external drive is a different piece of hardware. Even giving this drive the same name, "Pictures", and navigating to it in Time Machine, the system displays no history.

I didn't try the command line interface, but it is good to know that such a method exists.

Stay safe and stay healthy!

Tim

alaska_tim said:

I ended up going through the file browser. For some reason, while the NAS mounts when I turn on the computer, the Time Machine disk image (computer_name.sparsebundle) needs to be manually mounted. This often gives an error that the drive in unaccessible, but with repeat attempts this eventually worked for reasons that are unclear to me. This was pretty nerve wracking, as I couldn't tell if the file was corrupted, or if there was some network issue.

Navigating through Time Machine was a dead end. I suspect this is because the physical external drive is a different piece of hardware. Even giving this drive the same name, "Pictures", and navigating to it in Time Machine, the system displays no history.

Click to expand...

I've just tried simulating restoring (something from) the TM backup of a non-boot drive with said non-boot drive not present. In my case that would be a second internal drive that I unmounted for this test.

Using the TM interface, I first went back in the timeline (using the right-hand time axis). I then selected my machine name in the 'Finder' sidebar. The latter does bring up a list of all drives backed up by TM. Selecting the non-boot drive there though kicked me out of the TM interface and presented me with the Finder view of my Time Machine backups.

Naturally cannot be sure that the observed behaviour is universal. I've restored stuff from TM backups of non-boot drive via the TM interface with the source non-boot drive still present. But if that drive isn't present anymore (and probably just an identically named drive isn't enough), you'd end up using the Finder to access the TM backup regardless of how you start.