I am unable to restore my backups from my Time Machine

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JohnRKnight Author

Level 1

1 points

I am unable to restore my backups from my Time Machine

MacBook Pro – My reformatted system that won't restore from my time machine - HELP PLEASE

I loaded Lion when it first came out and all my troubles started. (It was the same on my 24” iMac). Mail particularly hardly worked on either machine after loading up Lion but that's another story and I wish I had never upgraded to Lion.
I am now in China and took my MacBook Pro with me
To avoid mail problems I eventually used web-mail as all I saw was the coloured spinning wheel all day long otherwise
Gradually the machine got slower and slower and I saw that coloured wheel more and more
Eventually a message came up to say my Bootable Drive was almost full.
I checked and it wasn't full of MY documents. I see on this forum it's an Apple problem - reformatting and restoring user files will not help the problem
On 1^st November I did a Time Machine backup that completed OK
Since then I had removed ALL documents safely to my Sony Vaio that we bought instead of another Apple Mac.
Despite removing ALL documents and emptying the trash for two users the HDD continued to fill up rapidly
I decided to do one more last backup on Time Machine so I could reformat the system – This backup never completed
I had to reformat the system as it was totally not useable by now
I had expected to put a Snow Leopard DVD in and restore my system without any problem - I have done this before on my iMac
I was unable to point the restore to my time machine as it has a WD lock partition and Apple restores don't recognise the drive may be locked!
No problem I thought, as I will do it later through the tools utility called Migration Assistant
I have tried several times with Leopard and Snow Leopard but cannot get the utility to work, as it is obviously picking up the corrupt “LAST” backup (This is a shortcut to the 6th November uncompleted backup
I tried to move the 1^st November one to the last and move the other out as “”Corrupt”, but we are not allowed to change time machine files. Brilliant idea but Apple stopped it!
So, I loaded Snow Leopard and got it to see my Time Machine Files and restored first the Applications – No problem
Then Library – This failed as “You haven't permission” - What! Why? This is MY Laptop and MY files. Apple have to sort out this permission problem. I have had it three and a half years and it has driven me mad. It's a flawed way of working in my opinion. It took me three years to empty the trash because of it.
I then tried to restore the "System" folder which also has a library folder and that failed the same - Why doesn't Time Machine restore what it's told to? Is it because I called the MacBook Pro something different? It saw the backup files OK and gave me the option of the previous MacBook or my iMac that I also had on the same drive. I chose the MacBook but it would NOT restore the system.

Conclusion

So, I am stuck in China without my MacBook Pro and unable to restore my system and unable to retrieve the 1^st November backup which was taken properly.
This means that I cannot run any programmes and do any work
I have wasted two weeks altogether on all the combined problems and without a usable system
Any ideas how to restore back to the 1^st November please? Thanks in advance!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2), With Time Machine

Posted on Nov 16, 2011 4:13 AM

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Answer 1

JohnRKnight Author

Level 1

1 points

Dec 10, 2011 8:35 PM in response to JohnRKnight

UpdateAfter Advice from Apple

RESTOREPROBLEMS

I spoke from China on the1st December to a very helpful Senior Apple Technical person. He gave me my guidelines for a successful restore and we hung up.

Unfortunately, the backup hadn't enough space, so I repartitioned the hard drive and THEN followed his instructions.

At 6 am there was amessage to say it had restored OK (See screen-shot to say it wassuccessful) and so, I pressed OK to restart the MacBook Pro.

All I got was the same as before - a grey spinning wheel.

To cut a very long storyshort, I wasted the whole day trying to make a backup work to no avail. I came to the conclusion that this is yet another example of Lion not working, as I have never had this problem with Leopard and Snow Leopard.

I then got a screen shot of a message never seen before and that may help Apple ….

So, I sent them that screen-shot. Restarting did nothing of course.

Timeto stop the nonsense!

To cut my losses of many days wasted time over the last 5 weeks, I gave up trying to restore and as I have all the data safely tucked away on an external drive, Irebuilt the MacBook Pro with just Leopard.

I then put all theApplications back on one by one and it runs perfectly. Luckily I also had these with me in China!

Ablisteringly quick system on the old Leopard

In fact, Pages and AdobeCS4 are how they were when we purchased the machine 3.5 years ago -Blisteringly quick.

I have a mega large Pages Newsletter about China that I think was over 20 Mb before I shrank it, as it had many photos. This brought the MacBook running Lion to it's knees. On my rebuilt MacBook Pro running Leopard, it ran blisteringly quickly,even before shrinking it.

I managed to finish thenewsletter that I had started on the 21st October and we bulk emailedit out as a PDF 1st December from my MacBook Pro running Leopard.

In fact, the machine isrunning so well, that I think I will stick with Leopard.

LION

I always suspected the problem with Lion was it was constantly doing SAVES all the time that were in the foreground and not the background that I was unable to type in productively. My own opinion is that the developers had been trying to be TOO clever with Lion and for a busy person like me it crippled my productivity that went down by 50% and then eventually to ZERO %.

CONCLUSION

I would like to thank the Apple Technical person for his efforts on my behalf and felt that he should receive this update to close the case.

I stated that hopefully he can pass my observations to the LION TEAM Management or to whoever in Apple needs to see this feedback. The dozen or so problems with Lion have already caused us to go and buy a Sony Vaio instead of another MacBook Pro.

This anti-Apple attitude is by a person that for over 3 years was utterly and completely soldon Apple. No more, as Lion killed all my enthusiasm for Apple. My colleague as well. I asked the Apple Technical person to PLEASE pass this on! Whether he passed the report on I will never know!

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