restoring time machine backup to new mac

Naming the new volume the same as the old one makes it very easy to go back one step in time and restore the contents of that volume's root directory. You'll have to manually move both the visible and hidden items once the restore is done. If that's a problem I believe you can navigate up one level to the machine in the Time Machine window, select just the external hard drive backup, and restore everything, but it will then be in a folder named after your external hard drive. You can control-click on an item in Time Machine and have it delete all backups of an item if you end up in this situation, but then you'll lose all your old archival backup data for the drive.Īlso, I suspect this method misses hidden files at the root of the drive - if you've changed the drive icon it isn't restored, for example. When I tried this method last year in Leopard, Time Machine decided that the identically-named drive was a new drive with the same name - I ended up with two backups named 'Ext HD' and Ext HD 1', one of which was the old, discarded drive, and the two together doubling the amount of space they used on my backup drive.

I am in the middle of a restore using this method, and have yet to see whether Time Machine in Snow Leopard successfully identifies the new drive as the same as the old drive. I tried Migration Assistant but it didn't appear to have the ability to select a specific hard drive to restore. Prior to doing this I turned off Time Machine backups while this long restore was taking place. You can then go back to your last backup, select all the files and folders at the top level of your (old) drive, control-click on them and restore them. After that you need to open the (empty) drive in Finder and then 'Enter Time Machine' from the Time Machine icon in the Menu Bar. Naming the brand new drive the same as the old drive is the first step, but it doesn't get your files restored.

Restoring time machine backup to new mac