Having issues getting a Time Machine restore done on my iMac.

Unless you bought the Mac version of the GoFlex, it came for use with a PC and was formatted NTFS. To use it with a Mac, it needed to be formatted with a GUID partition table and as Mac OS Extended, preferably Journaled. The drive comes with an NTFS driver for Mac pre-loaded on the drive which is probably how you managed to write to the drive at all, since without such help, the Mac can only read from NTFS formatted drives, not write to them. Apple says "Time Machine can’t backup to an external ... drive formatted for Microsoft Windows (NTFS or FAT format)" so I assume that driver is what made the difference. Did you ever try restoring anything, even a single file, using Time Machine to establish that the Time Machine process actually worked both ways?

While I'm surprised that Time Machine allowed you to write to an NTFS drive for backup purposes in the first place even though that Seagate NTFS driver made writing to it possible, that driver is not present on the install disk so your Time Machine backup files are likely not recognized by it as valid for restore purposes if they ever were. Though I doubt that you'll be able to use the Time Machine backup for restoration (unless you tried the restore test mentioned above and found that it worked), I'd advise doing the install without trying to restore, then installing the NTFS driver, then seeing if Migration Assistant in the Utilities folder will recognize the TM backup for restoring as TM did to make the backup.

Oop's, have a look at > Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions 2. What can Time Machine back up, and where can it put it’s backups?

FatMac\>MacPro wrote:

...I'd advise doing the install without trying to restore, then installing the NTFS driver...

In case you didn't archive the NTFS driver installer that came on the GoFlex, Seagate has it here: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=goflex-software&vgnextoi d=11c1fab114b48210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

rkgr wrote:

Having issues getting a Time Machine restore done on my iMac running Snow Leopard. I was using a Seagate GoFlex Home network drive for the Time Machine Backups and my main drive failed and had to be replaced. When trying to restore the Time Machine does not recognize that the GoFlex has a backup to restore from. I have tried several different strategies around this. I used the terminal to make hidden files visible and I can then see some hidden files and directories on the GoFlex Home but still no actual timemachine files. I then got the adaptor for the Network Drive to turn it into an external USB 3.0 drive. I could then see and mount a timemachine directory that was now visible as .timemachinebackup on the GoFlex Drive.

If the NAS was connected via your network, there should be a sparse bundle disk image named for your computer on it, with .sparsebundle extension (It may also have the 12-character MAC Address of your Mac, depending on how it was made). That will have it's own format of Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitve, Journaled), so it doesn't matter what format is on the actual drive.

That might be inside the .timemachinebackup folder.

Assuming there's a password and/or account or share set up on the NAS, have you entered that to be able to view the backups?

That's the problem with using 3rd-party NASs with Time Machine -- they all have their own mini-operating systems, different connection and security protocols, even different names for things.

rkgr wrote:

. . .

When switching the drive to the USB adaptor, I can see a folder that doesn't show up under the Network mode called .timemachine (I incorrectly called it .timemachiebackup earlier). This folder only becomes visible after using the show hidden folders option. When I click on the hidden folder it does show a sparsebundle file that can be mounted and then I can enter Time Machine and restore individual files using the browse other Time Machine Disks option,

That's a prettty strange setup, and not how Time Machine likes things (obviously), but I don't use a NAS - what little I know about them is from trying to help folks here (mostly stumbling around in the dark).

I just haven't been able to do a complete restore where it restarts and runs off of the install disk. I have tried to do the migration in the network mode with no success.

You're probably not going to be able to do a full restore, unless you can mount the sparse bundle via Terminal, while running from your Install disk. I can tell you how to show hidden folders, but I'm not sure about mounting the sparse bundle via hdiutil. If you're comfy with UNIX and Terminal, though, that should work.

I haven't tried it yet when hooked up by USB and will probably give that a shot next.

It sounds like you may be able to use Migration Assistant via USB, once you mount the sparse bundle. One caution, however -- the user account(s) you transfer may lose permission to the backups. See the pink box in Problems after using Migration Assistant for an explanation.

The way to avoid that is to use a temporary Admin account that's got a different UID from any of the accounts on the backups. Use the procedure in the 4th option in the green box of that same article (it says Lion, but will work in this case as well, since you can't use the tan box). That should get your Mac set up just the way it was (although you'll probably have to run Software Update to get back to 10.6.5).

And see Using Migration Assistant on Snow Leopard or Leopard if you have any questions about that.

Good luck, don't hesitate to ask questions or for clarification, and keep us posted.

EDIT: By the way, what do Seagate's instructions say?

Message was edited by: Pondini

rkgr, I'm currently using GoFlex Home as NAS to back up my time machines... Looking at your post, I'm afraid, I might loose my files with this config.

Could you post, what happened in the end? Did you manage to back-up? How did you do it?