Hi! macbook air 2012 running Catalina. I've backed up in time machine before erasing the entire HD. Trying to restore from back up now, but screen is stuck on the apple logo with the bar below 95% loading. I've already hard restarted it several times, to no avail. Suggestions please...
SOLVED Macbook air 2012 cannot restore from back up
- Thread starter Josep
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You’re fortunate to have a Time Machine backup. How did you erase the drive?
My suggestion is to reboot into Recovery (cmd-R), run Disk Utility and reformat the drive again. Just select the main drive (I suppose “Macintosh HD”) and click on Erase. You will lose the data partition and have a single partition left. Select APFS format.
If successful, quit Disk Utility and choose to reinstall macOS Catalina. If the macOS installation is good, choose your Time Machine drive for the migration source.
By the way, if you previously installed Big Sur, even if onto an external drive, Recovery will probably choose Big Sur to install because of your current firmware version.
My suggestion is to reboot into Recovery (cmd-R), run Disk Utility and reformat the drive again. Just select the main drive (I suppose “Macintosh HD”) and click on Erase. You will lose the data partition and have a single partition left. Select APFS format.
If successful, quit Disk Utility and choose to reinstall macOS Catalina. If the macOS installation is good, choose your Time Machine drive for the migration source.
By the way, if you previously installed Big Sur, even if onto an external drive, Recovery will probably choose Big Sur to install because of your current firmware version.
Hi Tony. I erased the drive using Disk Utility. I’ve done as you suggested and reformatted the drive as AFPS, and did a fresh install of Catalina. I’ll just have to manually copy my files back into it.
Thx for your suggestion. Works like a charm now.
Thx for your suggestion. Works like a charm now.
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Good job! Depending on your setup, manually restoring your files can be daunting, and you might miss a lot of items. One advantage to that is you will be reinstalling apps as well as doing the initial setup. Keep in mind that a much simpler and automated method is to use Migration Assistant.app. Just point it to your Time Machine drive and it will do the rest.
It’s OK. Most of my important files are backed up in the cloud anyway, so copying them back won’t be that bad. Plus, I can also just reinstall the apps that I really need. I realized that a lot of the apps weren’t being used and were just taking up space. Noted on the Migration Assistant.app. I’ll try that the next time I upgrade to a new MacBook. Thx again!