Restoring macOS from Time Machine - Mac OS Tutorial

- So, what do you do if your Mac is so messed up, you have to start from scratch? Can Time Machine help us? Let's talk. - [Narrator] You're watching ITProTV. (upbeat music) - Hello, welcome back to Apple Certified Support Professional, MacOS 11 Big Sur. I am Zach and this is Don and we're so glad to have you here, now what do you do if you're so messed up, you have to start from ground zero. - (chuckles) Alright, to clarify, if your computer's messed up, not if you are messed up, well, we can't fix that with Time Machine, but in this episode, we're going to learn how to use Time Machine to completely recover our system, if we just treat it as nonrecoverable, we're going to blow it away, you'll see how to use Time Machine to get the things together that you need actually boot to recovery, start that restore and get your system back up and operational in short order. - So what would be the scenario where we would need to restore the entire computer? - Well, hopefully, there's no scenario where hopefully you don't ever have to do this, but it does happen, right? So potentially let's say that your operating system becomes corrupted, right? So you can't even boot into MacOS, well, if you've got a Time Machine backup, you can just restore. Maybe you get a virus, right? Once you have a virus, even if you have antivirus software and it says it's clean, you don't really know you're clean. So you format your computer and you restore from Time Machine. Maybe your hard drive fails, so you go to the store and you buy a brand new blank hard drive, is blank, how do you recover from blank? You can't install iCloud on it. So you recover from Time Machine. In all these scenarios, you have to bring back everything. The operating system, the preference files your applications and your data. Your data might be synced into iCloud, but in order to get your Mac up and running, you need all the other bits that go along with it. Time Machine backs them up, we just need to jump in and leverage that recovery. There is one more scenario I want to highlight, a failed upgrade, you know what if you're running a MacOS Catalina or El Capitan, and you upgrade to Big Sur and halfway through something goes wrong. Well, Apple uses some snapshot technology that's designed to help prevent problems, or at least allow you to recover like downgrade real quick. But sometimes they don't work or sometimes the upgrade does work, and then you find out some application you run isn't compatible, right? And so now you're like, oh shoot, I upgraded the Big Sur. And I need to go back to Catalina because program X, Y, Z doesn't work, well, downgrading is a really dicey process that doesn't always work, in fact, a lot of times it doesn't. So it's easier to just format your system and restore from Time Machine. So those are all different scenarios where you might want to just say, that's it start from scratch, wipe the machine, restore and get back in business. - But where do we need to get together before we perform a restore? - Sure, so, I mentioned like format your machine. Don't do that until you know you've got all the things you need, right? So step one, you need a Time Machine backup. (laughs) So if you don't have a backup, nah, not going to help. You can always boot to recovery and re-install MacOS, you just lose your data, and then you can sync from iCloud or wherever you'll have to re-install your applications, that's kind of the hassle there, but you need a Time Machine backup. If the Time Machine backup is encrypted, right? If you've been following our episodes, you know ours is encrypted. You'll need the encryption key. You won't be able to recover without that encryption key, really important to have that one. You'll need to have hard drive space. If old hard drive was one terabyte in size, and I've been backing that up with Time Machine, and then it fails and I go and buy a 500 gig hard drive, not big enough, right? Then the hard drive needs to be big enough to hold the time machine restore, otherwise it's going to fail. And then the last thing you need is time. Actual time, Time Machine restores are not fast, they generally take an hour to two hours, the more data you have the longer it's going to take a thunderbolt drive will speed things up, but most of us just use USB for that, so it's going to run at USB speed, so you just need to be patient while it runs the process. But assuming you have all those things together, then you're ready to jump in and do a restore. - So again, assuming we have all that together, how do we actually perform the restore? - Yep, so it's pretty straightforward, we're going to use recovery environment. So we've covered the recovery environment in a few different episodes, but in this one we're going to focus on restoring from Time Machine. So first thing I need to do is power my computer off, right, and if it's broken, it's probably off already, but mine isn't, so I'll shut it down. And then we're going to boot to recovery. Now, while I'm doing that, when you boot to recovery, you immediately see an option to restore from Time Machine and you can jump right into it. Personally, I like to add an extra step before I do that, though, right? Let's assume for a moment that my situation is I got ransomware or malware or something bad on my computer and I don't trust my computer right now, okay. Well, when you choose to restore from Time Machine, it doesn't actually format the hard drive. It copies the files from Time Machine back onto the disc, and so it is possible for ransomware and other things and just I'm holding Command + R while I boot, just to make sure you guys are know what's going on because the screen is blank right now, so command + R is going to boot me into recovery while it comes up, but ransomware could potentially survive through a Time Machine restore, right? Especially if it's embedded it in your hard drives boot sector or whatever, so whenever I do a Time Machine restore, one thing that I like to do is boot to recovery and format the hard drive first, erase the hard drive and that way I know everything is gone from the hard drive. And once that's done, then I restore from Time Machine. Now I get a little bit nervous sometimes that if I'm going to erase the hard drive, what if I mix it up and pick the wrong hard drive? What if I pick my Time Machine drive instead and I erase that one, right? That's a little bit risky, so the steps that I like to follow are I will boot them Mac up without the Time Machine drive attached, just not attach just boot to recovery, erase the hard drive. Alright, once the hard drive is erased, then I'll plug the Time Machine disc in, and then I can do the restore. So those are kind of the steps that I follow. So let's run through this, my system just finished booting into recovery, and I see the options that very first one is calling out to me hey, Don, don't you want to restore, restore from Time Machine is right here. I should get you to do the voice, (both laugh) but I'll tell you it's coming out to me, but I'm not going to do it, right, I'm going to go down to disk utility first and in the disc utility, I will go and find my internal hard drive, which in my case is a 250 gig SSD. Now looking at it here, I see my base system and there's that external USB disc, that's my Time Machine disc, right? I don't want to mess with that one, I'm going to go up here to my internal hard drive. And I'm seeing the volumes right now. Remember a Big Sur and Catalina they do virtual discs. So I'm going to go up to my view menu and tell it that I want to view all devices. And the reason I'm doing that is I want to see the disc itself, I want to see my SSD, right? I want to choose that and I want to erase at that level, I want to erase the entire physical disc. Now, sometimes this can fail, and if it does, I might need to go through and delete the individual volumes inside of it. In my case, actually it probably will fail because I booted off of recovery off of the disc, I didn't do internet recovery, but we'll see, I'm going to just try and format it here as Macintosh HD. It's going to format IPFS, I'm okay with that, and we'll try and erase, and again, if we get an error, it'll be because my recovery drive is in use right now, booting to internet recovery would solve that problem. Nope, it worked for me though, so there we go. And so I can see that is erased. Now I've got that Macintosh HD sitting there waiting for me, I know it's clean, right? It's got a new boot sector, everything's erased, now I can go in and I can start that restore. So this is where all the other different pieces come into play, I'm going to quit out of disc utility, and I'm going to go choose restore from Time Machine. And then when I continue forward, it's going to get me set up to restore from Time Machine. So it's a little menu or a little wizard that I walked through, it's now going to look for any Time Machine disks on my system if I plugged them in, or if I've got a network one, is scanning the network and looking for them as well, which actually I don't recall if I connected to my wireless network or not looking up here in my system bar, I see that I am connected to a wireless network. So it is actually checking the network, but I know my USB disc is what I have. So I'll choose that, and if it's an un-encrypted disc, you'll see a next button, and then you would get to pick which backup you want to restore, mine's an encrypted disc. So instead I see unlock, and when I click unlock, it's going to prompt me for the password for that disc. And this is where I need that encryption key. I cannot restore without the encryption key, so I will punch that in. And it's the one that I set when I turned on firewall not firewall when I turned on Time Machine, if I hit show hint, I actually type my password in there so I can see what it is, but I'll go ahead and hit unlock. Now it will be able to look in and see all the backups that are in that disc. So now I see the continue option and now it's going to give me a list of all my backups. Now this is a little bit challenging here because I have to think, when did my problem start? How far back do I need to go, did this just happen? Can I just go back one hour or do I need to go back to yesterday, right? I'm going to go all the way back to my very first time machine backup, which was honestly just this morning. So I'll go ahead and choose it, and basically when I moved forward, it knows, hey, this is MacOS, it's going to copy it into my machine, it's going to bring in everything that I need, and it's telling me, well, I need to use the Migration Assistant transfer data, re-install MacOS if necessary, I formatted my drive. So MacOS is gone. And instead of restoring that from Time Machine, it can be faster to install it from recovery. And so that's what it's offering for me right here is saying, hey, do you want to install MacOS from recovery, and then we'll pull your data from that backup. So I'm going to go ahead and hit install MacOS. Now that's coming up because my disc is Big Sur, and my recovery is Big Sur. If the versions didn't match, it wouldn't have prompted that it would actually have started the restore from there of everything cause the operating system would have to come from the disc. But in my case, I can choose re-install MacOS Big Sur and I can let that run. - So Don, we just re-install as normal and then go back to restore, is that what you're saying? - You actually don't it's a little bit weird. So we're going to do a re-install right, So that's something we've already seen, it's not flashy, I'm just going to click next a bunch of times. - Okay. - But you may remember from way back in episode, I don't know, two or something in this series we installed Big Sur, it asked us what we wanted to restore our settings from a Time Machine backup in the installation process, and so we'll tag it there and read it, so we don't have to come back into recovery for this. So I'm going to go ahead and just kind of run through this. So it's offering to install as Big Sur so I'll hit, continue on that, and so it's getting ready for that, it gives me my license agreement, this is all stuff that we've seen before. Nothing too fancy here, I'll pick my hard drive, which is completely blank at this point. And so we'll move forward and it's going to get that install going now it's installing MacOS and one of the it's done, it's going to reboot, it's going to boot MacOS nice clean, shiny MacOS, right off of this hard drive. And then the user setup wizard is going to start, right? It's going to ask me for my name, I'll say Don Pezet. And then it's going to ask to me would I like to restore my data from Time Machine, and I've got my drive attached, I'll be able to pick that and it'll restore the system with all of my data and I'll be back in business. Now I want to kind of restate when you're restoring from a backup to a system that's running the same operating system, so I have Big Sur recovery and Big Sur on my Time Machine backup, that's where it all fits just to do the re-install. If those operating systems didn't match, it would skip this step. It would actually restore the operating system and put me back on Catalina or some other version of MacOS. - So are there any follow-up steps we need to take once the restore is done? - It's actually pretty straightforward, right? So the install runs just like a normal install, that that process is telling me has 21 minutes remaining, so we'll let that run. Then we would go to restore the settings, right? We're just going to choose to restore the settings and let that happen when the actual restore is done, and we're back on, there's just a few things we need to double check. You need to look and make sure your files are actually there, right? So did everything come back? Cause you're going to have to pick which Time Machine backup you want to resource, you got to make sure you got the right one. You'll also want to double check your key chain, right? The key chain where all your username and passwords are stored, that key chain may have a different password than whatever you picked when you created a user account, which means it's going to have to be reset. So when you go into key chain, you can just provide your old password, that'll update it. And that kind of fixes that if you don't remember your password, it will erase the key chain, which isn't the end of the world. You'll just have to repopulate it, websites won't have saved passwords anymore that kind of thing, and you'll be able to go through. So those are just kind of a couple of nuts and bolts there that you have to tackle. Now, my restart still says that it's got 20 minutes remaining so why don't we leverage the magic of Hollywood here to let this fast forward to the point where I can actually get in and restore the Time Machine backup and we'll get a chance to see that. - Okay Don, it's been about 20 minutes, TV time up, (don laughs) but how are we doing, how is everything going? - Alright, so the install is finished, it's booted back up and we pull up my screen you'll see what we're now in the user setup wizard so on a new computer, you walk through the basic questions and that's how we're treating this, right? So right now it is a fresh and clean computer, if I were to just leave it, but as we move forward, we pick our language or input any accessibility options we need, we connect to a wireless network if we need to, I'm just going to skip that, and we'll go past that, I'm actually plugged into a physical network connection so I don't really need that anyway, data privacy settings, if I want to adjust those, this is the screen that's important right here, Migration Assistant, okay. Now I'm restoring my system, I'm not migrating to a new Mac, but technically I formatted. So this is considered a new Mac, so now I can migrate my settings in, notice the option here, it says from a Mac, Time Machine backup or start up disc so I can pull my settings from the Time Machine backup, I'll choose that and hit Continue, it's going to look and find my Time Machine discs so there's that USB disc right there, which I can select you do the click on it, if you only have one disc, I've missed this a couple of times where, you want to click continue, but you don't necessarily get that visual cue, if there's more than one item, it's really obvious you're supposed to click on it. You can choose other server, if there was some kind of network location you wanted to find, but minds of the USB disc, I'll pick that and continue from there. And now it's going to look at that disc and it's going to have to ask me, which backup on that disc I want to recover. Oh, I forgot it is encrypted, so I've got to unlock that, so I'm going to come in here and punch in the password for my disc so it can unlock it. Alright, and now it's going to index it to find out what backups are there and give me a choice. And so I'll have a choice because of the various dates that are on it and so it is loading that right now, if I just be patient and then we'll be able to move forward on it, so actually hang on, let's see, did it not load? There we go, alright. I just had to select it again for some reason. So looking at it here, what it defaults to is whatever your most recent backup is. So mine is showing one that was done at 8:24 AM Pacific standard time, that's what's showing up, but if you expand it out, you can actually see the different backups that are in there, I might not want to restore to the newest one, maybe I want to go back a few versions maybe I want the oldest one that's on there. In fact, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to pick the oldest one that's on there and then I'll hit Continue. So now it's going to prepare the source, it's checking the drive, making sure that it can parse all the links across that drive to figure out exactly how the hard drive looked at that time, and then it's going to start the restore. Now it does give me the option to leave some things off, maybe I don't want to bring everything back, but in my case, I do, that's the default, I want everything back and notice that it's the applications, my user documents and settings, miscellaneous files and folders that are part of the operating system configuration and then system and network, all my system settings. I didn't bother joining the wireless network because the wireless settings are going to come from this restore in a moment. So it will be able to join and know the password and all that without me having to type it in again. And I'll go ahead and hit Continue on that. It is asking me to reset my password so I can come in and set that if I need to, in my case, I don't remember what it was exactly before, so I'll go ahead and set it just so I know it. And this is where I mentioned earlier, our key chain password, if I just punched in something different than what the key chain password is, I might have to reset the key chain we'll find out, but basically we hit continue, and there it goes. Now it's restoring that backup, and when it's done, I will have a fresh and clean install of MacOS, but then with all of my settings drop back on top of it, my Mac will be exactly how I left it first thing this morning, before I started messing around with it, and this process will take awhile it says about 10 minutes. However much data you have is going to determine how long this restore takes, but when it's done, you will have fully recovered your Mac from scratch. - A magic of Time Machine as if nothing ever happened, it's fantastic, Don, before we move on, anything else you'd like to say? - Well, the key rule of Time Machine is to have it enabled before you need it because if you have some kind of failure, you can't retroactively turn on Time Machine, so although that would be nice. So you do need to make sure that it's on, it's healthy, that your backups are running, but once you've got that set up, if you need to recover individual files, you can, but if your situation is bad enough, malware, ransomware, failed hard drive, that's where restoring straight up from the Time Machine backup restoring your entire system is the way to go and you'll be back up and going before you know it. - Fantastic, thanks again, Don, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Apple Certified Support Professional MacOS 11 Big Sur. Make sure you watch every episode. Hope to see you again, bye bye. - [Narrator] Thank you for watching ITProTV.