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User profile for user: BISI_Sysadmin
BISI_Sysadmin Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

recover system from time machine, with key user's profile on external hard drive. Time machine made with High Sierra, system now running Big Sur.

I have a macbook pro 13" 2017 with 16 ^B RAM and a 1 TB SSD. My wife rapidly outgrew the 1 TB disk storage with her photography. I migrated her profile to an external 4 TB drive. The drive is called LornaExternalHD. The profile is in MigratedUsers/Lorna.


She uses the adobe collection of tools extensively, notably Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. She is very averse to upgrades, but recently reached the point where she needed to upgrade Lightroom. In order to do so, I needed to upgrade from HighSierra. The upgrade failed repeatedly (first from the System Preferences menu, then online recovery, then an external boot drive).


So now I have a freshly installed system running Big Sur (Monterey has wasted enough of my time).


My question is one of guidance. Is Migration Assistant up to the job, given the not-factory configuration of the hardware when Time Machine was doing its thing? Both the time machine drive and the external drive holding the profile are completely functional. I have made a second copy of the external hard drive.


What's the best course to take here? There is too much data for a simple restore to fit onto the integral SSD. So, do I just connect the external HD, cross my fingers, launch the Migration Assistant and hope for the best?


Or do I do I re-create the user, get the external drive working manually with the new (identical) userID, and manually re-install all the applications, and hope the tens of thousands of photos in the lightroom catalog are properly recovered?


Other courses of action happily considered.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Nov 21, 2021 10:39 PM

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User profile for user: BISI_Sysadmin
BISI_Sysadmin Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Posted on Nov 27, 2021 12:24 AM

After all was said and done (and a few trials using an rsync-ed duplicate of the external drive) Migration Assistant was unable to do the job.


So I essentially

  • re-installed Big Sur,
  • was careful (after previous trials and errors) to create the user with the externally-located profile (aka home directory), so that she had the same UID number (504) as on the original system (determined from trying to change the ownership of the files, and learning a lot in the process)
  • adjusted the location of said home directory in System Prefs -> Users&Groups -> userID to be the correct location (same as original system).
  • made the user able to administer the machine
  • logged in as the user
  • installed all the apps from scratch, set up NFS and SMBFS mounts (from scratch), installed printers, etc.


There were, of course, many details, but the adobe apps (notably lightroom classic) did the right things and continued to work. Never used time machine at all (other than to prove MA could not do the job). Thank heavens for a spare 4 TB drive hanging about to experiment with, keeping the source external drive safe from harm.


I will have to look into the carbon copy cloner option.

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User profile for user: BISI_Sysadmin
BISI_Sysadmin Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Nov 27, 2021 12:24 AM in response to Barney-15E

After all was said and done (and a few trials using an rsync-ed duplicate of the external drive) Migration Assistant was unable to do the job.


So I essentially

  • re-installed Big Sur,
  • was careful (after previous trials and errors) to create the user with the externally-located profile (aka home directory), so that she had the same UID number (504) as on the original system (determined from trying to change the ownership of the files, and learning a lot in the process)
  • adjusted the location of said home directory in System Prefs -> Users&Groups -> userID to be the correct location (same as original system).
  • made the user able to administer the machine
  • logged in as the user
  • installed all the apps from scratch, set up NFS and SMBFS mounts (from scratch), installed printers, etc.


There were, of course, many details, but the adobe apps (notably lightroom classic) did the right things and continued to work. Never used time machine at all (other than to prove MA could not do the job). Thank heavens for a spare 4 TB drive hanging about to experiment with, keeping the source external drive safe from harm.


I will have to look into the carbon copy cloner option.

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User profile for user: Barney-15E
Barney-15E
User level: Level 10
116,722 points

Nov 22, 2021 5:21 AM in response to BISI_Sysadmin

I don’t know if MA will recognize the home folder on the external drive, but if it did, it would try to migrate to the internal which doesn’t have enough space.


Options:

  1. Set the new user home to the current external drive home.
  2. Just move the photo library to the external drive. I don’t use Adobe anything, but I can’t imagine you can’t store the photos outside your home folder.


Did you back up the external drive with Time Machine? It should back it up, but you may need to remove it from the exclusion list.

I’ve found restoring an external drive from Time Machine somewhat convoluted. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my externals that hold my photo, video, and music libraries.

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recover system from time machine, with key user's profile on external hard drive. Time machine made with High Sierra, system now running Big Sur.

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