Time Machine Error 112 when trying to restore from a network backup

Question

Level 3

616 points

Time Machine Error 112 when trying to restore from a network backup

My laptop has been backing up over the network, with Time Machine, to an external hard drive connected to my Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is also doing Time Machine backups to the same external hard drive. The laptop backup shows as Laptop.sparsebundle disk image. My laptop hard drive crashed and I'm trying to restore it from the Time Machine backup. Instead of trying to do the restore over the network (not sure if that's even possible or advisable) I have plugged the Time Machine external hard drive directly into the laptop. I booted the laptop with a replacement hard drive holding option, and selected the Time Machine drive. When I go to select the Time Machine backup image on the hard drive, I get error 112 (the backup cannot be opened). If I try and select the backup for the Mac Pro, it works.

Is there some trick to restoring from a network Time Machine backup??? Any thoughts as to why I can't access the laptop backup?

Thanks in advance

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008), OS X Yosemite (10.10), C2D 2.4

Posted on May 15, 2015 2:09 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

May 15, 2015 3:22 PM in response to Joe Mac

Connect the backup drive to the server and try to restore via the network. That's the supported way to do it.

Reply

Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

May 15, 2015 2:28 PM in response to Joe Mac

Can you mount the disk image file by double-clicking it?

Reply

Answer 3

Joe Mac Author

Level 3

616 points

May 15, 2015 3:17 PM in response to Linc Davis

Yes, when I double click the image it mounts "Time Machine Backups" and has a Backups.backupdb folder inside with what appears to be all the backups.

Reply

Answer 4

Joe Mac Author

Level 3

616 points

May 17, 2015 7:32 PM in response to Linc Davis

Hmm, I guess i'm not sure how to do that in my situation. The hard drive is connected via FW800 to my Mac Pro, not plugged directly into the network. If I boot the laptop plugged into an Ethernet cable, there isn't any way for me to boot to the Time Machine drive to start the recovery. I was only able to boot into recovery when the drive was connected via FW800 directly to the laptop.

Reply

Answer 5

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

May 18, 2015 7:40 PM in response to Joe Mac

You don't have to boot from the Time Machine drive in order to restore from it. You can boot from the Recovery system on the client, if it still has one, or from Internet Recovery if the model supports it. If you have a 2008 MacBook Pro, as indicated in your profile, you can't use Internet Recovery, but you can download the Yosemite installer on the working Mac and use it to install on the MBP. That will give it a Recovery system.

Reply