Time Machine restore worked ONCE, but now seems broken, won't restore

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Time Machine restore worked ONCE, but now seems broken, won't restore

I startup in Recovery mode, try to restore from Time Machine backup, and it says no backups found. I am in DIRE need of a fix for this. I did this once (thanks to the kind direction of this Apple community), and it actually worked, but took 27 hours. I got a good reboot, and saw all my files back. Then the SSD failed again, and all went away. I reformatted the SSD again (hopeful, right?) but when I went to restore from Time Machine, it says No Backups found. They are there, I can see them in Finder, but the Recovery mode does not recognize them anymore. What are my options? Should I take the backup drive (a Seagate 4 TB drive) to an Apple Genius for diagnosis? I am willing to spend money to recovery my files, over 1 TB of music, photos, documents, data.

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Nov 6, 2020 7:57 AM

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Answer 1

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John Comeaux Author

Level 1

19 points

Nov 18, 2020 2:16 PM in response to John Comeaux

It turns out I should have used MIGRATION ASSISTANT, which is an app in the Utilities folder, instead of Restore from Recovery mode. Didn't know about that. Apple support was super nice and helped me get it done.

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Answer 2

John Comeaux Author

Level 1

19 points

Nov 6, 2020 5:11 PM in response to den.thed

I wasn't clear. In Recovery mode, it asks which disk contains the backup Time Machine data. I choose the 4TB disk I use, and it doesn't find ANY Time Machine data. No backup data found. In Finder, I can see the backups.db database, but the recovery program fails again and again to recognize it. As I said, this worked ONCE, so I had confidence it would work again. No luck. It's like the computer is being stingy and saying "Haha, I gave it all to you, and you lost it again, sucker."

So, the issue is how to get Recovery mode to see the backups.db database on the disk drive. I did perform disk repair after several tries, to see if something was amiss.

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Answer 3

den.thed

Level 9

77,674 points

Nov 6, 2020 8:09 AM in response to John Comeaux

Try going back in time a day or two, before the initial problem started.

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Time Machine restore worked ONCE, but now seems broken, won't restore

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