Restoring data from Time Machine to a replacement secondary drive

See Pondini's TM FAQs, for starters.

Ah! The proverbial missing info. Those are the best guides on the web WRT to TM, so I'm out of ideas, especially since I don't use it. You'll have to await a TM maven to pop in and give some advice.

I don't know whether this procedure works in 10.6. I've only tested it in 10.8

Turn Time Machine OFF temporarily in its preference pane. Leave the window open.

Navigate in the Finder to your backup disk, and then to the folder named "Backups.backupdb" at the top level of the volume. If you back up over a network, you'll first have to mount the disk image file containing your backups by double-clicking it. Descend into the folder until you see the snapshots, which are represented by folders with a name that begins with the date of the snapshot. Find the one you want to restore from. There's a link named "Latest" representing the most recent snapshot. Use that one, if possible. Otherwise, you'll have to remember the date of the snapshot you choose.

Inside the snapshot folder is a folder hierarchy like the one on the source disk. Find one of the items you can't restore and select it. Open the Info dialog for the selected item. In the Sharing & Permissions section, you may see an entry in the access list that shows "Fetching…" in the Name column. If so, click the lock icon in the lower right corner of the dialog and authenticate. Then delete the "Fetching…" item from the icon list. Click the gear icon below the list and select Apply to enclosed items from the popup menu.

Now you should be able either to copy the item in the Finder or to restore it in the time-travel view. If you use the time-travel view, be sure to select the snapshot you just modified. If successful, repeat the operation with the other items you were unable to restore. You can select multiple items in the Finder and open a single Info dialog for all of them by pressing the key combination option-command-I.

When you're done, turn TM back ON and close its preference pane.

geedubya wrote:

. . .

I have named the new drive the same as the previous drive

Try a different name (even slightly different). That can cause problems on Leopard. I think it was fixed on Snow Leopard, but I'm not certain.

I put my password in and it just copies over the top level folder without any of the contents.

I'm assuming you've navigated to the backups of the drive in question, and selected one or more of the top-level folders (not the folder representing the drive itself)?

Then right-clicked or clicked the "gear" icon in the toolbar, and selected the replacement drive?

If not, try it that way.

geedubya wrote:

. . .

I let TM backup to my second TM drive and it has assumed the replacement data drive is not the original

Correct. A new (or erased) drive has a different UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier), so OSX and TM know it's a different one, even with the same name. Effective with Lion, you can tell it to treat it as if it were the original, but not on Snow Leopard.

The good thing about having given the new drive the same name as the old I think, is that all my software instruments except one are quite happily finding their media.

Yes. Sorry, I didn't explain that after restoring to a different name, you could change the name back.

If I delete the original drive backup, will TM keep trying to back it up?

No. It will only back up drives it can find, and that are not on the exclusion list.

You might want to leave the old backups there for a while, until you're sure you don't need them anymore. To see the backups of the old drive, you'll need the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting. Since it has the same name as the new one, you'll have to go by the backup dates.

Then you can delete all backups of it, via the procedure in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12. Since you used the same name, however, you'll have to be careful to get the old backups via #E3, not the new ones. If you do, it will delete only the backups of the old drive.

Does this process work better in Lion?

The only real difference is, you can tell Time Machine to "associate" the new drive with the old drive's backups. That will treat them as if they had been made from the new drive -- Time Machine then only does an incremental backup of the changes, and new and old backups are all in the same timeline. The procedure is a bit geeky, involving Terminal and a UNIX command, but does work.

Open the Info window on the volume to which you're trying to restore and uncheck the box marked Ignore ownership on this disk, if you haven't already done so. Then try again to restore in Time Machine.

geedubya wrote:

. .

I could delete the old backup under 'Latest'

No: Latest is simply an alias to the most recent backup. If you delete it, it won't really change anything, and Time Machine will re-create it. You'll still have separate backups of the two separate drives.

I was just suggesting that you could delete all the backups of the old drive, to save space. The only way to do that is via the TM interface, per my previous post. The backups of all other drives will remain.

I could then maybe associate these to the new drive when I upgrade to Lion.

Yes, you could do that. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting. Browse through it all, but you'll need the procedure in the tan box, and must be sure to select a backup of the old drive. They'll all have the same name, so you'll have to remember the date.

That won't save any space, but then all the backups of that drive will appear normally -- you won't need the workaround in #E3 of the Troubleshooting article to see the old ones.

I am also tempted to try this again with another replacement drive following the method described above i.e. using a different name for the replacement drive rather than the same name. I would really like to know if this actually works or not for future ref.

I suspect you'll have the same problem, because of the messed-up permissions. 😟

And what is the solution to this whole issue then?

It certainly isn't deleting backups. I'm not sure why you've gone off on that tangent.

geedubya wrote:

. . .

It's just that the latest one is renamed Library HD 1' whereas all the original backups are named 'Library HD'. And my new drive is named Library HD of course.

Sorry, you lost me. If both new and old drives are named "Library HD," WHAT is named "Library HD 1"?

And how did it get that name?

But I am confused by the fact you say I could associate the old backups with the new drive under Lion. How can I if I delete them all? Are we talking at cross purposes?

No, that's either-or. If you don't delete them, you can "associate" them later.

Also, why do you think the permissions would be messed up?

The problem you had trying to restore seems to be related to the permissions. That's what Linc has been helping you with.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that there was a problem in Leopard when you restored the backups of a data-only drive to another drive with the same name. That's why I suggested trying a slightly different name. That doesn't seem to be an issue on recent versions of OSX, but I'm not sure when it was changed.

And what is the solution to this whole issue then? 😕

Perhaps the issue is, there are really two problems:

First is not being able to restore properly. That seems to be caused by the permissions issue, and Linc's suggestion to restore to a volume that ignores ownership would probably work. However, then the files on that drive would be available to everyone. If that's a problem, it can be fixed going forward, but the permissions on the older backups probably can't be fixed -- if you need anything from them, you'll likley have trouble restoring from them. There are workarounds, but it will still be a problem.

Second is the problem of how the backups of the two disks appear in Time Machine's TimeLine, and needing the workaround in #E3 of the Troubleshooting article to see the old ones. That can be fixed once you're on Lion, per #B6 in the Troubleshooting article.

I'd also suggested that, if you need to save space on the backup drive, you could delete the backups of the old drive, if you want to (keeping the backups of the new one). Since the old ones would be gone, you'd no longer have the second problem.