After restoring from Time Machine, the app store no longer connects

To fix your App Store issue try this: Launch iTunes on your Mac and go to the Advanced tab. Click: Reset warnings and Reset cache.



 Now from the iTunes menu bar choose the Store menu and Sign Out.Now try the Mac App Store.

If that doesn’t work quit the App Store and then open your library folder by going to the Go menu in Finder and press the Option key to reveal Library. Select it. Now go to:

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.appstore/Cache.db. Move the Cache.db file to the Trash.



~/Library/Preferences. Move the com.apple.appstore.plist and com.apple.storeagent.plist files to the Trash.



~/Library/Cookies. Move the com.apple.appstore.plist and Cookies.plist files to the Trash.



Again try launching the Mac App Store. The first option seems to do the trick for most people.

I’m rather confused by your report of what you did. You said:

Obviously you cannot just restore from Time Machine, as the harddisk size is different. So, I did a fresh install of OS X El Capitan...

But then

and when that was finished, I went to Time Machine and restored everything to my 'new' MacBook Pro.

So it sounds like you did restore from Time Machine. Does this mean you just restored your account but not the applications? Did you restore only some of the folders from your account?

And when you were finished do I understand that you deleted the account that you made immediately after you installed the operating system?

If you were able to restore from your TimeMachine backup by using Migration Assistant after installing El Capitan and creating a new account then you should have been able to do the same with Setup Assistant. There’s only one difference between Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant - SA is only run from inside the installer otherwise they are the same. By using Migration Assistant and then deleting an account you have caused a good deal of confusion. Not only does an account have an account name, it also has an ID # and your old account no longer has the same ID# that it originally did. Because this can cause problems with quite a few applications Pondini (the late great guru of TimeMachine) found it best to not migrate the master account.

What I recommend is that you wipe the machine, reinstall El Cap and then when it asks if you want to migrate data from another computer or TimeMachine, say yes and select your TimeMachine backup.

Let’s say your computer has a 1TB drive, you have 300GB of data on it and you are installing a 500 GB SSD. It doesn’t matter that the SSD is smaller than the internal drive. All that matters is that the data on the old drive will fit on the SSD. Now if you had 700 GB on the internal drive and a 500GB SSD that would be a different story.

Please launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take an action that isn't working the way you expect. Select any lines that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.