Restore files from a time machine backup file

Today I had a situation after a migration of an old Mac OS system to a new machine from an older time machine backup file it took ages to restore. First the file was larger then expected to restore. In this case I needed to deselect some files, I wasn’t aware that iphone / ipad back-ups are stored in a different location which you can’t deselect on the migration.

Migration slower then the slowest creature on earth.
How to make some easy progress

First of all the migration didn’t go so smooth as expected. The time expectations of an Mac OS system is far from ideal. Known that Windows minutes aren’t correct either time to time. This blown my mind. waiting on a restore with the time 8 hours and 16 minutes in your screen jumping back to 3 hours and some minutes after 4 hours waiting. In the end it too more then 7 hours with the message 16 minutes to go.

Interrupt the restore and get the system up and running was to solution to be able to use the system as it suppose to be. The only thing was the certain files aren’t on the new system and we were stuck with old files which could have been deleted prior the migration.

Tip: delete old files prior migration of an old Mac OS system to a new one.

After deleting some old files. the system was cleaned up. Now we were able to try to restore some of the files which were missing. Now it’s not smart to start the migration tool from the utility folder. Do the following instead. browse in the finder to the time capsule / time machine share. Connect to this share and locate the file from the old system.

Mount the old time machine file in the disk utility

When you have mounted the selected file in the disk utility. You will be able to browse the file system of this file. This way you can restore files from certain dates back. The file can be opened on any other system then the original system. It saves some hassle to restore files if you know it before.

Most people would like to have a fresh system, but want to contain the old saved files. This way you can do it. In the mean time you can create a new time machine file to back-up your newly fresh system.

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