Restoring files to a new Mac

Mac’s died? Moving to a new machine? Time Machine can help…

There are several instances in which you might need to restore large chunks of data from Time Machine or another backup instead of just individual files or folders; maybe you’re restoring an entire system back onto an existing Mac in the event of a serious system crash or a replacement hard drive having been installed; perhaps you’re copying specific elements like apps or a user’s Home directory back to an existing Mac; or maybe you’re migrating one or more users across Macs.

Since OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has used a new system for restoring data. Previously you needed a system DVD or bootable USB drive to boot your Mac into the special system chooser mode. Now, OS X reserves a small partition of the hard drive as a ‘Recovery Partition’, and holding down å or ç+R during booting should take you to this mode. Even if you’ve replaced the hard drive with a completely blank one, as long as you have an internet connection you’ll be able to boot into this mode as it starts up from a special Internet Recovery system based on Apple’s servers. This allows you to perform certain core tasks such as formatting the existing hard drive and installing a new system or recovering from a Time Machine backup.

Recovery mode

If you’ve suffered a serious problem and your Mac won’t start up properly or you have had to replace the internal hard drive, boot into Recovery mode – or, on an earlier system, by booting from the installer discs – and connect your Time Machine backup drive, whether over the network or directly. It can also be a network drive on your local network, though this will take a little longer due to Wi-Fi being slower. From the Utilities menu, choose to restore from a Time Machine backup and you’ll be able to restore the whole system back onto the new drive, or a recently erased existing hard drive.

There’s another scenario where you either have a new Mac, or you don’t want to restore the old system byte-for-byte, perhaps because it had some issues or was cluttered with stuff. A new Mac will always ship with the latest version of OS X preinstalled, or you can use the Internet Recovery system to install a clean version of the latest OS onto a blank hard drive. In this case, you might want to restore only specific data from your backup. Boot the Mac into its new, pristine system and then run the Migration Assistant utility from the Applications > Utilities folder.

For power users, consider bootable clones of your system as well as Time Machine backups

Make sure your Time Machine drive is connected and when the Mac reboots, you can choose what data to restore. Selecting Apps will restore applications, selecting Documents and Data will restore the contents of the Home folders of whichever users you choose, and choosing Computer Settings will copy over your desktop picture, network settings and the like. (You can even bring stuff over from a PC to your Mac using the Windows Migration Assistant app.)

Miracle cloning

For some power users or those with mission critical machines, it’s a good idea to have bootable clones of your system as well as a Time Machine backup, which is itself not directly bootable. By using a tool like SuperDuper, OS X Server or Carbon Copy Cloner you can create a disk image on an external drive or even a central server from which your Mac can boot using the NetBoot protocol. The advantage of this method is that in the event of a problem you don’t have to wait for a reinstall or necessarily even need a network connection if your clone image is on a portable hard drive. If your Mac’s drive dies, you can boot from the clone image and continue working, then sort out the internal drive problem later. A Time Machine backup by itself will not allow you to do this. Cloned images can also be used as the basis for restoring a system to an internal drive if they have been created to be compatible with this technique.