Recovery from Time Machine when no bootable back-ups appear.

Question

Recovery from Time Machine when no bootable back-ups appear.

So I'm working on a Mac with a Time Machine drive attached to it. The Time Machine drive backs up normally every hour, day, week, etc.

I boot from recovery mode (Command-R on startup) and enter macOS Utilities. I then erase the internal drive and then try to restore from the Time Machine backup. It sees the Time Machine drive but states there are no bootable backups to recover from. Not a single one. So nothing can be restored that way. And yet nothing is being excluded from the backup so why would that be?

The solution seems to be to erase the internal drive, reinstall macOS and then migrate the users' data and applications across.

Still, surely it should be able to recover a bootable system as usual?

Any ideas good people?

Posted on Jul 10, 2020 8:42 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

steve626

Level 6

11,501 points

Jul 10, 2020 6:15 PM in response to The_Knowledge_Seeker

Did you follow the steps EXACTLY as stated in this Apple Support page:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203981#macos

Note that to restore both the OS and your files there is NOT a step in those instructions to first erase the disk, but it sounds like you did erase the disk.

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Answer 2

Jul 11, 2020 7:50 AM in response to steve626

Did you follow the steps EXACTLY as stated in this Apple Support page:

Up to step four, yes. But step five says "If you're asked to choose from a list of backups organized by date and time, choose a backup and click Continue." I was not given a list of backups so couldn't proceed.

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Answer 3

steve626

Level 6

11,501 points

Jul 11, 2020 9:34 AM in response to The_Knowledge_Seeker

"I boot from recovery mode (Command-R on startup) and enter macOS Utilities. I then erase the internal drive and then try to restore from the Time Machine backup. "

The Apple instructions for restoring BOTH the operating system and files do not include a step to erase the internal drive but you say that you did that. Since you first erased the disk, your only option is to install a new operating system after booting into recovery followed by migrating applications and files over from your Time Machine backup.

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Answer 4

Jul 11, 2020 10:19 AM in response to steve626

The Apple instructions for restoring BOTH the operating system and files do not include a step to erase the internal drive but you say that you did that. Since you first erased the disk, your only option is to install a new operating system after booting into recovery followed by migrating applications and files over from your Time Machine backup.

I don't see how erasing the internal drive would have any effect on restoring a full Time Machine backup.

In any event, I re-tested this and, this time, attempted to restore the full Time Machine backup without erasing first. Same issue. Which meant my only option was to then erase, reinstall macOS, and migrate again.

All very odd.

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Recovery from Time Machine when no bootable back-ups appear.

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