Attempting to restore from Time Machine backup but its not seeing the latest backup

Question

Attempting to restore from Time Machine backup but its not seeing the latest backup

I recently had to send my MacBook Pro 2017 13" to the Apple Repair center because the USB-C ports stopped working, preventing me from doing things like charging the machine. My most recent backup was to a Time Machine on March 9.

Any time you send your machine in for repair to service center, they wipe the device, no matter whether the issue is related to disk or OS or not. No big deal I thought - I have a recent backup and I also copied critical files to Google Drive. When I received the repaired machine, it was completely wiped so I needed to restore it.

When I go in to restore from Restore mode (Booting in to Cmd-R), I attach to my network and go through the Migration Assistant to attempt the restore. The latest backup it sees is from March, 2017! This cannot be right as I have definitely verified backups more recently than that. I suspect this date is tied to my previous Mac. When I connect to the Time Machine drive from another Mac, I can see that the myMac.backupbundle and myMac.sparsebundle files are there, and have timestamps from March 9.

I'm at my wits end here as to what to do...I am confident that the data is there somewhere but unsure how to proceed with attempting to recover it. I've already spent 2 days on this unnecessary task and am not sure what to do next. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Prior to being wiped, I was running Mojave.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 16, 2020 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

raina_b22

Community Specialist

Mar 17, 2020 8:44 AM in response to gregoryfromburlingame

Hello gregoryfromburlingame,

Thanks for reaching out in Apple Support Communities! I understand you're not seeing your current backup when trying to use migration assistant. I'm happy to assist you with this.

Let's try restoring your backup by following the section of this article that states "Restore both macOS and your files": Restore your Mac from a backup

If you have trouble restoring from your backup, review this article for steps to help resolve issues you may have:

If you can't back up or restore your Mac using Time Machine

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities, and have a great day!

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Answer 2

Mar 17, 2020 10:25 AM in response to raina_b22

Thanks for the pointers to the knowledge base articles, but my case is way beyond that.

I figured it out actually. It turns out I had upgraded to Catalina, which changed the extension used for TM backups from <myMacNetworkName>.sparsebundle to <myMacNetworkName>.backupbundle. When I was attempting to restore from Mojave (or any earlier than Catalina version), it was seeing the old TM backup file with the .sparsebundle extension, and attempting to use that as its source of restore. Because mine was from 2017, it thought that was the latest.

I am now 20 or so hours in to the restore process (it is restoring over a network connection, so it estimates to take over 2 days even with a fast network). I will update if it does not work, but if you don't hear anything else, assume it worked.

In summary for other users...

After you upgrade to MacOSX Catalina, any backups through Time Machine will use an extension of .backupbundle, not .sparsebundle. If you have any older backups with the latter extension, the Restore from Backup or Migration Assistant can potentially be confused.
You will need to upgrade your Mac to Catalina before restoring from one of these newer, Catalina-sourced backup images.

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Answer 3

MoonJ.

Community Specialist

Mar 17, 2020 11:20 AM in response to gregoryfromburlingame

Hello again gregoryfromburlingame,

Thanks for the update. I'm glad you were able to locate your backup. The time it takes to restore a backup can vary depending on your network speeds and amount of data that is restoring. Hopefully your backup restores with no additional issues.

Take care.

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Attempting to restore from Time Machine backup but its not seeing the latest backup

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