unable to restore from Time Machine

In my most recent attempt, I've tried off the time machine on the NAS, by booting with command-R, and doing a time machine restore to the 10.13 that was last backed up. it failed very quickly, it failed in about a minute.

So to recap, I've tried:

1. installing 10.14, restore from NAS.
2. reinstall 10.13, restore from NAS.
3. reinstall 10.14, restore from NAS.
4. restore data from a 10.11 USB backup onto a 10.14 clean install.
5. restore with command-r to 10.13 from NAS, with the erase hard drive option.

There may be variations in that, but those would be the milestones.

Keith

You'll have to forgive me, but, the OAS? Is that the drive that stores the Time Machine backups? The service? And by Startup assistant, are you referring to the Migration Assistant?

Thank you,

Keith

I've now twice tried to restore from a USB drive that was used to backup prior to the upgrade to High Sierra upgrade from a couple of years ago. It seems to have failed to migrating from the USB drive to the now Mojave-based computer.

I've now found myself without an OS on the drive. In my latest attempt, I tried to wipe the disk, i got 7.51GB from the NAS Time Machine, when the system "crashed". By crashed, the screen goes black, the keyboard no longer indicates that it's accepting input (using the caps lock as my only visual cue), and I'm forced to start all over.

If I try to Start from scratch with shift-control-command-R, to start over, it doesn't recognize the APFS, and I find myself being unable to reinstall the original OS.

My USB flash drive, which is separate from the USB Mountain LIon that I have an original secondary backup, has been made into a bootable Mojave. Only when I boot from it, it won't let me install Mojave.

I'm getting further and further away from the goal of installing Mojave, and restoring data from Time Machine. This is becoming a bitter pill!

After finding a youtube video where the trick to circumventing the error "this copy of the install macos high sierra application is damaged and can't be used..." by booting from the High Sierra bootable USB installer, going into terminal and applying the command "date111213142016", I've been able to reinstall 10.13 to a fresh installation.

I'm now going to take another shot with the Migration Assistant.

Nope, no further ahead. No matter how I try to use Time Machine it crashes about 5 minutes into the transfer, and never gets further along.

I'm going to start exploring tmutil. I wonder if there is logging that I can use to investigate why it fails/crashes. And then, what I can find to move past it.

I've given up. This isn't going to work.

BDAqua, thanks for trying. Have a good one.