Time Capsule Backup Too Big to Restore on New Drive

Question

Time Capsule Backup Too Big to Restore on New Drive

Mid 2012 Macbook Pro

Last week my 500GB internal hard drive decided to start whistling and die. No biggie...I think... I have Time Capsule with recent backups and am feeling adventurous when it comes to taking the case off my MBP. Since I use a 1 TB portable external drive alot and a 4TB hard drive connected to my airport extreme ac router so I thought I'd save some money and speed up with a 250GB SSD. I don't use internal storage often and it's usually just a middle man to one of the other drives so I went smaller. I went off to find a YouTube guide and stick the little speedster in. All is well until I try to restore from Time Capsule and told my new SSD is too small for the restore. UGH.

I'm assuming that ill just have to do fresh clean install of Lion, back to just out of the box specs. But do I have to do a file by file, one by one, restore from Time Machine? I'm looking and looking amongst the community posts here and it seems to be an a full restore or I'm SOL. Is there a way to edit a backup to make it smaller or maybe some option to select what you do and do not want to restore at the moment? Maybe omit photos and music for this restore and come back for them later? Or maybe a better way to get files from backup? IIRC last time I had to cherry pick one at a time.

Thanks guys.

MacBook Pro (15-inch 2.4/2.2 GHz), Time Capsule,

Posted on Nov 15, 2015 9:11 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 20, 2016 1:43 PM in response to RealSailorCCTx

Load a clean version of whatever OS you want to run and migrate your data from the TM backup.

Unfortunately Migrate is not granular enough to be able to select files (directories really). But you can make some decisions.. user files for the most part are easy to import or link to after the install.. The main thing is to have a full recover to a hard disk somewhere which will allow you to easily pick and choose directories to recover.

So here is my recommendation..

Buy a fast USB external drive.. That means buying your own bare drive.. rather than a standard 2.5" USB drive. Like WD or Toshiba.. which are also fine.. but I would buy a 1TB or even 2TB hybrid drive.. these are not much more expensive than standard spinning drives and now come with effectively a tiny SSD built in. You just need a standard USB3 to sata cable then to run it.

My nice white melanine top bench.. (slab of chipboard on two draw units found on the side of the road). Is of course an insulator.. the SSD back is sealed but the standard hard disk is not so make sure it is covered with a piece of plastic.

I bought the USB drive to SATA cable from ebay for a few dollars.. buy a USB3 rated one.. but my mac is 2011 and missed out.. your 2012 Mac has USB3 so you will get great speed through it.. the power supply on these ports is sufficient to self power a USB 1TB drive..

What I did is load my original internal SSD Mavericks OS to the External drive via Carbon Copy Cloner to make it a bootable backup.

Then I partitioned the internal drive and loaded both Yosemite and El Capitan.. so for testing purposes I can boot to any OS.

Once you have a full copy of your old files on the external drive.. you can simply copy and paste them to your new SSD.. as you pick and choose the ones you want.

NOTE.. the 128GB SSD came out of a Mac Mini the guy got me to replace with a 500GB SSD because he finally learned that using small SSD.. even with the original 500GB spinning drive in there made a poor combo.. and fusion didn't work at all well.. in the end we decided to pull both original spinning drive and the SSD and just opt for larger SSD.. really for the price you pay now for 500GB SSD.. I would opt for that..

What you tried was interesting.. but it doesn't work well enough in the long run.. when you carry your laptop around .. you need your files.. and no TC or iCloud is going to become a suitable replacement for that..

Just my 2c. 😉😎

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Answer 2

Aug 20, 2016 1:53 PM in response to LaPastenague

It turned out that Time Machine allowed me to pick and choose libraries on the restore. I left my pics and some music out of the restore and worked out ok.

Thanks for the help.

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