Time Machine Restore. Going Round in Cirlces

Spoonhead

Prominent Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2006
Messages
2,186
Reaction score
241
Points
420
Location
Not near enough to Old Trafford
I have my OS X partition on a SSD drive running latest Mavericks. Due to its size, I moved my home folder over to another hard drive in my Mac Pro.

This morning, when booting up, received an error message that I couldn't log on and found that the drive with my home folder on had failed to mount and wouldn't repair. So no problem I thought, swapped out with a new drive and promptly restored the files and folders from the last backup. Because I couldn't log on, I had to log into my admin account. After that was complete, I was left with all the files sorted, but none of my preferences, account settings in mail etc. restored. The dock was just the original default after re-logging on to my user account.

So I then went to this site, OSX Tips Using the Recovery HD and thought I should restore my OS X drive as well. Did that, from the restore drive after holding alt/option down at start up, but then nothing booted at all. According to that guide, would appear to a common problem. I could however get back to my boot options at startup.

So now I am currently into doing a fresh install of OSX on the basis I can hopefully restore my preferences etc from the back up.

What did I do wrong?
 
Just an update. I now have my account back and it's all booted up fine, but still no preferences and settings missing.

Digging a bit further, it would appear that my ~/Library folder didn't get restored in the the earlier time machine restore. So I'm now doing that.

Time machine sounds so straight forward, so why is it so difficult to get back to where I had it before I had the crash?
 
Last edited:
That still didn't completely work, as my mail accounts and mail boxes were still missing, and my preferences and layout of apps were not there. Also some programs, (iPhoto and MS Office 2011) were corrupt and had to be re-installed.

However I was able to restore my mailboxes from the back up and import them again. Setting up my accounts was pretty easy as well.

I've just had to sort out how my dock looks and re-do finder prefs etc.

So overall I think I've got back to more or less what I had before. Funnily enough, my programs, such as photoshop, remember my recently opened files.
 
I have my OS X partition on a SSD drive running latest Mavericks. Due to its size, I moved my home folder over to another hard drive in my Mac Pro.

What did I do wrong?
You moved your Home folder. Don't do that.

By all means move files that YOU have put inside it - especially movies.

You can move your iPhoto library and iTunes library (but look up how to do this correctly, otherwise you'll lose them!)
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom