I've never done a restore from Time Machine..but my wife's iMac's internal disk got corrupted and (after much work) I've been able to select a backup.....but now Time Machine says it's "waiting". It's been "waiting" for an hour now. How long should I "wait"? Or is this like waiting for the "Iceman to Cometh"?
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), 4gb ram, 320 GB disk
I Hope it has completed its restore for you by now.
A restore will take different amounts of time depending on your machine: the amount of data backed up (everything covered by your usual time machine backup), the speed of your connection to your Time Machine disk, and the speed of your iMac's internal disk. If your Time Machine disk is connected by USB then its limited by your USB speed (USB3 or USB2). If it is on a network (Time Capsule) then connecting by Ethernet cable is better than connecting via WiFi).
The recovery mode process will take a long time to read all the data which it will try to restore, and this can make predictions about duration which are wildly inaccurate. My last restore predicted about 20 hours (for about 300GB to restore to a standard hard disk), and I was surprised when it later changed its mind and predicted completion in a couple of hours.
if you get no prediction at all within an hour or so, I would guess that something else is wrong. Try verifying the Time Machine backup from another computer (alt-click the time machine icon in the menu bar). In case someone else can be more help, please post details of your iMac, what sort of disk your Time Machine backup is on (USB2/USB3/FireWire, HDD, SSD) and how you connect to it (direct cable, network connection, WiFi), size of backup etc.
How long does a Time Machine restore take?
