Restore to Snow Leopard from Lion Time Machine

The image is from the Lion one, but the window content display looks the same from the Snow Leopard one, which is the one I actually tried first. To image the Snow Leopard one I would have had to restart again, so I took a shot of the Lion one just so you might see what I saw, more or less.

I am now in the middle of some other stuff in the background so I cannot reboot Snow Leopard to go through the process start to finish, but I will give that a try later to see what happens.

I'm quite puzzled by all of this because it just doesn't make sense that downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard should become so arcane or impossible. Why would we be left stuck in the mud if we did not know prior that we had to make a special Snow Leopard backup or we could not return to Snow Leopard without losing the Home folder, etc?

Sure glad I don't rely on TM backups, though. 😁

Kappy wrote:

. . .

I'm quite puzzled by all of this because it just doesn't make sense that downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard should become so arcane or impossible. Why would we be left stuck in the mud if we did not know prior that we had to make a special Snow Leopard backup or we could not return to Snow Leopard without losing the Home folder, etc?

That's not new. You couldn't use either Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to transfer from Snow Leopard back to Leopard, either.

Sure glad I don't rely on TM backups, though.

It has nothing to do with Time Machine. You can't go backwards with Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant directly from another Mac or from a clone, either.

Well, I know I've used Home folders from various version of OS X without issue. I certainly agree as to full system restores other than to freshly formatted drives. But I don't recall any problems downgrading the OS, then migrating over the Home folder.

I've done several migrations of my Snow Leopard Home folder to various Lion installations without incident other than minor configuration changes.

I've made a clone of the Home folder onto a separate volume and used the same Home folder with a Snow Leopard and Lion system installed on two other separate volumes.

Kappy wrote:

Well, I know I've used Home folders from various version of OS X without issue

I've never been able to go backwards to a different major version (Lion to Snow Leoaprd, Snow Leoaprd to Leopard) with either Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant. You can go backwards between minor versions (such as 10.6. to 10.4), though.

I've done several migrations of my Snow Leopard Home folder to various Lion installations without incident other than minor configuration changes.

Yes, going forward is fine. It's backwards that's the problem.

I've made a clone of the Home folder onto a separate volume and used the same Home folder with a Snow Leopard and Lion system installed on two other separate volumes.

That works too, mostly. But the Snow Leopard version of some apps, such as Mail, won't work on the files if Lion has converted them.

"But the Snow Leopard version of some apps, such as Mail, won't work on the files if Lion has converted them."

Yes, that's true. For me a non-issue because I use IMAP mail. Definitely would be a problem for POP users. Would also be a problem with iTunes' library if it was changed. But if you have a TM backup from the Snow Leopard system those can be restored individually, as you've already noted earlier. I always keep a prior backup just in case.

I will need to re-write the downgrade process, I guess.

Kappy wrote:

. . .

I will need to re-write the downgrade process, I guess.

Cool. If I may, I'd suggest something like this for the Time Machine portion:

If you have Snow Leopard Time Machine backups, do a full system restore per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. If you have subsequent backups from Lion, you can restore newer items selectively, via the "Star Wars" display, per #15 there, but be careful; some Snow Leopard apps may not work with the Lion files.

By the way, this prompted me to put a better sample in #14 than the one posted above, showing both Snow Leopard and Lion backups:

Got it. 🙂

Did we finally ever get to a clear answer here? It's had to tell from the trail.

I have no doubt it's possible to perform a complete fresh install of Snow Leopard, and by various means (whether TM or otherwise) I can easily enough save user files (.doc, .xls. etc).

My biggest concern before starting the process of reverting from Lion to SL is the application-specific data: I would want to preserve all the email messages in Mail, which I assume are now in a Lion format; I would of course want to keep all the photos in the library of iPhoto which again I assume are now in a Lion format. I am worried that I spend hours copying files, more hours wiping and rebuilding our MBP, only to discover that the older Snow Leopard versions of Mail, iPhoto, etc are simply not capable of reading the updated Lion-formatted files.

Is this a non-issue or is there a problem here? If the latter - anyone found a way around it?

Thanks

I just rolled back from Lion to Snow Leopard using Time Machine this morning. I followed the steps in question number 14 from that that Time Machine FAQ link that Poldini's posted. It worked like a charm.

I selected to restore the Time Machine backup for the last day I had Snow Leopard, which was a week ago. There were only two small little hiccups. The first was that somehow Java got messed up (Minecraft, which uses Java, would no longer work). I downloaded a Java update from Apple and everything was fin. Then I got DRM error messages when watching Netflix. Deleting the Silverlight plug-in for Safari and reinstalling fixed it.

So now I'm back to a nice stable Snow Leopard and I'm not moving to Lion until they get it patched.

Can you have different users that use different operating systems?

Or differtent desk tops within a user with different operating systems?

I already "upgraded to lion" on a new imac not knowing my older versions of FCP would not be able to used.

aaronfromholyoke wrote:

Can you have different users that use different operating systems?

Or differtent desk tops within a user with different operating systems?

You can make a separate partition on your internal HD, or use an external HD, and install Snow Leoaprd on it. Then you can start up from either one, via System Prefs > Startup Disk or by starting up while holding down the Option key -- that invokes the Startup Manager, showing all the possible startup sources so you can select the one you want, something like this:

Pondini,

please take a look at this one:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3237615?answerId=15899137022#15899137022

Thanks a million!

Done. 😎