Migration Assistant can’t select Time Machine backup

Question

Migration Assistant can’t select Time Machine backup

My 2022 M2 MacBook Air had to be reset as part of a repair at the Apple Store and so far Migration Assistant during set up is failing to restore from my external Time Machine backup.

I can get as far as the Transfer Your Data to This Mac screen. I can select my backup drive and enter my encryption password, but when I click Continue a window pops up that says Connecting… for a few seconds, then goes away. I’m still at the Transfer Your Data screen, though now I can’t select my backup drive: it’s still there and not grayed out, just nothing happens when I click it. At this point I can either click continue and get the Connecting… pop up again or click the back button and start over.

I’ve tried doing this in Migration Assistant after set up, and from recovery mode. I tried Restore from Time Machine in recovery mode too, and was able to select my most recent backup, but it told me I would have to go through Migration Assistant. Please help

MacBook Air, macOS 26.3

Posted on Mar 16, 2026 11:58 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

dottore_sporcizia Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 16, 2026 7:48 PM in response to dottore_sporcizia

I’ve resolved this somehow. My Time Machine drive is a Buffalo Linkstation NAS and it wasn’t showing up as an external hard drive, but as another Mac. After I connected to it as a Mac, I copied the server address of the parent folder of the [My HD].sparsebundle Time Machine and pasted it into the Other Server Address field in Migration Assistant. It worked.

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Answer 2

iamshivam

Level 2

326 points

Mar 17, 2026 1:40 AM in response to dottore_sporcizia

What’s likely happening here is that Migration Assistant is getting confused because your Time Machine backup isn’t being exposed as a direct disk but as a network share from the NAS.

When macOS sees a Time Machine sparsebundle over SMB/AFP, it sometimes expects it to behave like another Mac running Migration Assistant rather than a normal backup disk, so the “Connecting…” loop you saw is basically MA trying (and failing) to negotiate the session.

By pasting the parent share address of the .sparsebundle into Other Server Address, you essentially forced Migration Assistant to mount the NAS at the correct level so it could treat the bundle as a proper Time Machine source.

For anyone hitting the same issue with NAS backups, the practical fix is to mount the NAS share in Finder first (Cmd+K → smb://server/share), confirm the .sparsebundle is visible at the root of that share, and then launch Migration Assistant. If MA can see the bundle directly instead of discovering the NAS as a “Mac”, the restore usually proceeds normally.

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