Copy Time Machine backup from NAS to external drive?

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Copy Time Machine backup from NAS to external drive?

I support a medium size group of Apple laptop users, a few of which I've been backing up with Time Machine to a Synology NAS. It's a good solution - because I'm not relying on the users to remember to plug in external drives to run their backups.

The problem is when I have to restore (especially a full system restore). Doing a restore over the network (wired or wireless) takes *forever*. And that understandable: there is network traffic and latency, other I/O on the NAS, other Time Machine backups on the same NAS, etc.

The Synology box has a USB 3 port, and I can easily connect an external drive to it. What I would like to do is copy *just* the container with a particular user's Time Machine backup - then plug that external drive into the machine onto which I want to restore.

I've tried this a few times with different formats on the external drive, but so far haven't been able to perform a restore.

Is this even possible? Specifically what I'm asking is: can I copy a TM backup from a NAS to an external drive, and then do a restore from that external drive?

Thanks - any advice would be appreciated.

Posted on Jan 17, 2024 11:12 AM

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lstein68 Author

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Jan 19, 2024 10:11 AM in response to lstein68

So I found a solution...

From a secondary Apple computer I connected to the Synology NAS (or, more specifically, the volume where I was storing my Time Machine backups).

I then plugged in an external USB drive into this same computer. Note: I've seen posts saying the format of this drive matters; in my case it was formatted ExFAT).

Copied the .sparsebundle from the NAS to the USB drive.

Connected the USB drive to the target computer (ie, the machine that I wanted to do the restore on).

Set the USB drive as a Time Machine drive and let TM inherit the backups.

Perform the restore.

Note: I also did a test where I wiped and reformat a laptop. From a cold startup (so, just like where you take a new machine out of the box), I was able to get System Restore (or Migration Assistant, I'm not sure which process Apple is running) to recognize the USB drive and do a full recovery. Trying to do this over a wired 1gb network (with only one switch between the NAS and the target computer) was estimated to take 27 hours. A solid-state USB 3 drive did it in a little over 2.

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Copy Time Machine backup from NAS to external drive?

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