Restoring from a Time Machine back-up - puzzlement!

Hello - I've read here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203981


Yesterday, I decided to wipe the hard drive on my iMac and reinstall Catalina from my Time Machine back-up. When I had to choose WHICH back-up to install, I noticed something which I felt was rather odd. Instead of simply choosing a particular date/time of the back-up to use, I had a choice of which hard drive to select too! There were many more dates available on one of the disks than the other. I took a photograph of what I saw to show what I mean:-



Have you ever encountered such a thing before? HD and HD1 - as I’m sure you can see.


SHOULD it be like this? Is it a phenomenon of macOS Catalina perhaps?


I decided NOT to use my Time Machine back-up at all. I did erase my hard drive ……… and then did much ‘fiddling’ to get Catalina back up-and-running again on this machine. Everything seems to be working but I’m keeping my external hard drive in its original state for now - I’m NOT making any back-up for the time-being,


I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks.


iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 24, 2019 4:03 AM

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Posted on Oct 29, 2019 9:18 AM

The one thing I've gathered while seeing various posts on this type of problem is two folded:


  1. Fact: Catalina splits the hard drive into Mac HD and Mac HD - Data. The first is the system and not writeable - you have no access to it. The second contains everything else and you have read/write permissions. The only place to see this is in Disk Utility and those two should be listed.
  2. If there are two of either showing, it appears that it was a botched install and/or the drive was not erased before a "clean" install. Which would mean to use recovery and erase your drive completely and reinstall from Apple (rather than TM). You would have to use other means (setup assistant or drag 'n drop) to get your files moved over.

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Restoring from a Time Machine back-up - puzzlement!

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