My external hard drive has failed and I purchased a new one. It is formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and I wanted to restore all the data from my Time Machine backup but I don't see where I can do this? I opened up "Browse Time Machine Backups" and couldn't restore anything and I tried Restore from Disk Utility and that failed as well. (I am on Sonoma 14.2 using a Macbook Pro M1 Pro).
Thanks in advance!
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.2
from Finder, navigate to the window that shows all Current drives. I have six on My Mac Pro tower:
then choose 'Enter Time machine' from the time machine menubar item:
now you have a display with all your CURRENT drives.
go back in time until the old drive appears.
Select the entire OLD drive and click the (Restore) button.
Time machine will offer to negotiate where you want it restored to.
start from a Finder window. Navigate to the My computer display that shows ALL drives.
Open Time machine.app there.
you should be able to go back to a time when you old Hard drive was working, and see its Icon and if you wish, see its old files.
then select the old drive and try to Restore to the new drive.
Do not use the OLDEST backup as the source for Restore unless that is exactly what you want.
Time machine has a whole host of backup STATES that can be pulled together for you, as of any date&time still in its database. It may exhibit a palpable delay while it collects and pulls those files together, but they will appear.
The 'Approved Method' is to select the exact backup date&time, and restore as of that date&time. Time machine.app does the detailed work. DON'T do the work yourself that the computer can do faster better cheaper and far more accurately.
Use Time machine.app, not to be confused with Time machine preferences.
Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support
I uses the "star wars" display receding back, back, back in time"
Currently my new External Hard Drive is empty and I can't seem to restore it from Time Machine, even opening the .app itself. It's as though Time Machine doesn't recognize it and won't allow me to restore the old hard drive to it?
Not sure if it's because the harddrive I have now is entirely new but all I can see are all the daily backup snapshots on my Time Machine drive. When I open Time Machine while in my NEW hard drive it's empty and there is nothing to restore it back to.
I can copy folders over but that won't take into consideration all the backups that have taken place after that.
This appears to be working splendidly. I did go back to the beginning though and I am restoring from my last backup. Would I need to then continue to go through each dated backup to complete the backup in its entirety? Does that make sense?
Understood! I am trying to restore the drive in its entirety since it failed. But when I go to restore it shows each snapshot in time. So I wasn't sure the most accurate method to restore everything at once to its most recent saves.
The most accurate method is to select the date closest to today where that old drive appears, and as long as it does not appear to be obviously defective, to use that as the source of the restore.
Time Machine is designed to supply an exact replica as of that date and time. It mantains a substantial internal database just so it can do this 'trick' on demand.
I think this makes sense now, thank you! Going to try tomorrow when I have time for the transfer to take place.
Restore new external hard drive from Time Machine backup
