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jkr98116

Q: restore snow leopard from time machine made on el capitan

My iMac is toast. I have a MacBook Pro, oldish but supported for El Capitan. I want to move everything from my El Capitan Time Machine, including the OS, to the MacBook Pro. Instructions for doing this involve booting from a recovery partition, or an internet equivalent. But the Snow Leopard OS does not appear to support these approaches. How to I boot in order to be able to restore?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 20, 2016 5:16 PM

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Q: restore snow leopard from time machine made on el capitan

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  • by yumyab,

    yumyab yumyab Aug 20, 2016 5:48 PM in response to jkr98116
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 20, 2016 5:48 PM in response to jkr98116

    I found out recently, after trying to boot my El Capitan Macbook Pro from a Snow Leopard ext hdd that Snow Leopard cannot read anything from the El Capitan drive. The other way round is ok though.

    The best thing I can think of would be to reinstall the Time Machine back up to El Capitan, then do a manual drag and drop back up of your data to another drive before installing Snow Leopard then dragging and dropping your backed up files to your fresh Snow Leopard install.

    This is because (if i remember correctly), time machine back ups are hard to browse. I always use Carbon Copy Cloner as it makes a bootable copy of my drive and you can also easily access your files if you plug it in as an ext hdd.

    You only really need to back up your home folder and just make sure your Keychain and browser folders are backed up,  then reinstall all your apps. Maybe a bit more difficult if you have a lot of paid for apps.

    This is what I would do, but maybe someone else has a much better idea.

  • by leroydouglas,Solvedanswer

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Aug 21, 2016 9:40 AM in response to jkr98116
    Level 7 (22,887 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 21, 2016 9:40 AM in response to jkr98116

    You will have to first upgrade the Snow Leopard to El Capitan from the App Store.

     

    Then use your time machine to migrate your user / el cap data using the Migration assistant.

     

    ~/Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant.app

  • by jkr98116,

    jkr98116 jkr98116 Aug 21, 2016 9:41 AM in response to leroydouglas
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 21, 2016 9:41 AM in response to leroydouglas

    Thanks. That worked perfectly. Thanks for the clear instructions.

  • by leroydouglas,

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Aug 21, 2016 9:44 AM in response to jkr98116
    Level 7 (22,887 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 21, 2016 9:44 AM in response to jkr98116

    jkr98116 wrote:

     

    Thanks. That worked perfectly. Thanks for the clear instructions.

     

    Good computing jkr98116 !