Time Machine - An error occurred while restoring from the backup

Having some trouble restoring a Time Machine backup. After some initial disk problems we had to reinstall OSX and this is what has been done thus far:

  1. Booted into Internet Recovery Mode (Command (⌘) – Option (⌥) – R)
  2. Reinstalled OSX
  3. Rebooted and into Recovery Mode (Option (⌥) – R)
  4. Selected to Restore from the Time Machine Backup
  5. Restore goes fine for 6+ hours (91%) and then fails with the message, "An error occurred while restoring from the backup. Restart your computer, and then try again"
  6. I tried an older backup from the same sparse bundle but having the same problem.

I have tried this three times but it fails in the same location each time. Any suggestions at this point would be Welcome.


Solution 1:

Basically you have to explore what's going wrong and fix it manually.

Hope this helps:

Inspect the installer 'Log' and if you have a 'Critical failure' pertaining to a particular folder(s), proceed with these steps:

  • Connect your backup to a working Mac (or fresh install MacOS on the Mac you're trying to restore to)

  • Open Terminal and mount the Time Capsule's sparse bundle (if using a Capsule rather than a USB/network drive).

  • In Terminal, use TMSafetyNet.kext to remove the troublesome folders one by one.

  • Return to Recovery Mode on the target machine and restore with the fixed backup.

Source: my blogpost, updated as MacOS updates