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After doing a fresh installation of OS X, I wanted to recover some of my data from a Time Machine backup using the Migration Assistant. However, when it comes to the selection of data to be restored, there is no way to unselect some of the items. Thus I'm forced to restore everything, which is not what I want because I know some of the system data is broken (that's why I did the fresh installation in the first place). However, I only want to restore my home folder and some applications.

I know that I can copy the files manually from the backup volume using cp -p but that leaves me with read-only files. Is there a better way?

mainzelM
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1 Answers1

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I don't know the exact motivation but as it seems, this problem occurs when OS X Server is installed in the source system (see Apple Support Community discussion). There, the recommendation is to uninstall OS X Server before the migration. However, this obviously does not work in all cases.

As a better alternative, use the tmutil restore command for the files/folder to be restored. For example to restore the home of user "foo"

tmutil restore /path/to/Backups.backupdb/computername/Latest/diskname/Users/foo /Users/foo

Before that, create the user and ensure it has the same user-id as in the old system.

mainzelM
  • 174