Please help! how to restore mac from a backup made by running restore?

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Please help! how to restore mac from a backup made by running restore?

Greetings...

Before trying to upgrade my son's macbook pro from El Capitan to Big Sur, I made a backup by running the restore command to an external usb drive of 500G.

The upgrade not only failed because of disk became full, but actually damage the partition - forcing a fresh install with help at an Apple Store, which wiped the disk.

The problem is, he lost all his applications and is unable to do school work. I did a search about restoring. But they are all about restore from a time-machine backup which we never learned to use.

Is it possible to restore from a restored backup? and how? Putting the drive to the mac is not an option as it is a different media.

Please help!

Posted on May 11, 2021 12:33 PM

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Answer 1

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bfzhou Author

Level 1

12 points

May 12, 2021 5:52 AM in response to HWTech

Thank you so much for answering with detailed explanation! We were able to user Migration Assistant to recover the application. Thank you! I didn't even knew the existence of Migration Assistant before, so realize I need to have a bit more knowledge over mac before doing anything significant.

I made the clone following a youtube video to upgrade the 100GB storage to 500GB. But the clone would not boot at all, then found out the High Sierra is the least version necessary. So the upgrade and disaster. Fortunately I did the clone attempt a month ago, otherwise we would end up with an empty mac with all data lost. I wonder how Mac can allow an upgrade to fail in this manner.

Anyway, we learned a lot through this process. Thanks again for your generous help and advice!

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

61,490 points

May 11, 2021 5:52 PM in response to bfzhou

Have you confirmed you can access the data on the external drive while booted to the clean OS?

Is the external drive a clone or did you save the image as a .dmg file or .sparsebundle?

At the very least you should be able to manually transfer the data files. It may also be possible to use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to transfer the user account and possibly the apps & settings. Even if the "backup" is in an archive (.dmg or .sparsebundle) it should be possible to mount the archive to be used by Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant.

FYI, using Disk Utility to "clone" a macOS boot drive is never a good idea as Disk Utility is a terrible app in all respects. If the Mac is bootable, then using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is the easiest & best option since you can clone the same drive you are booted from plus CCC will recreate the hidden recovery partition/volume. Whenever making a clone (to an image file or a bootable clone) you should always verify the image file can be opened and the data is there and if a bootable clone is made to boot from it to verify it works and all data is accessible.

Everyone should always have frequent and regular backups.

bfzhou wrote:

Is it possible to restore from a restored backup? and how? Putting the drive to the mac is not an option as it is a different media.

What do you mean by this?

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Please help! how to restore mac from a backup made by running restore?

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