You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Time Machine backup shows in recovery mode but not in migration assistant

I backed up before taking my machine to repair and I have a string of full backups on my external drive.

If I boot to recovery mode, they are visible but when I click them it tells me I need to use migration assistant to transfer the files from my newly blanked Mac.

When I boot up and try to use migration assistant, the backups just don’t appear in the box. None of them!

Would appreciate knowing a way I can restore all my files!!

Thanks in advance

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Jul 7, 2021 11:11 PM

Top-ranking reply

mooseworks.co.uk Author

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Jul 8, 2021 2:55 AM

[[***UPDATE**]]

I’ve stumbled upon a solution for this

I plugged in and opened the backup disk and then double clicked the sparsebundle

File which mounted the disk on the desktop and showed all the existing backups.

Then I opened migration assistant and it showed the last complete backup which it is now restoring.

The mounted sparsebundle disk image showed some other later backups but they must have been incomplete or something so they are not available to restore.

If anything else useful comes to light (like having access to the more recent backups that any be incomplete) I’ll update this again.

I hope this helps someone in the future

View in context

Time Machine backup shows in recovery mode but not in migration assistant

Similar questions