Emergency restore?

Blondfamily wrote:

Hi,

I have an iMac that just died and is past its use by date. I did have a time machine backup at the time. I have purchase a new iMac but the older machine had 3TB (as did the Time Machine backup) and the new machine has a maximum of 2tb. So I am unable to directly download the Time Machine back up on the new machine. I can't edit the old Time Machine backups to make it fit.

Have you actually checked how much of the 3TB drive is actually being used? It could be below 2TB so the 3TB drive's data will fit on the 2TB drive.

I have started to move individual files like photos etc from the Time Machine using finder.

Sounds like a nightmare! Manually dragging files is a recipe for disaster as you might miss key Library files. Having the Mac help (using Migration Assistant for example) is a good idea.

But I can't work out how to move the old emails from Microsoft 365 outlook on the Time Machine to the new machine? A lot of the explanations talk about creating archive files and importing - but I can not create an archive file of emails from the Time Machine .

You should only need to add a 'new account' with the user name and password and it should download all your eMail from the cloud.

Don't you have the emails stored on a mail server and that they will come back automatically after linking your new iMac?

Whew, good work! :)