Migration Assistant sees Time Machine disk, but never progresses after selecting and pressing continue

[chrishadaflavor]

Today I did four manual DFU restores of my work Mac because a) it has an issue which I thought might be software or firmware, and b) I have meticulous backups of my system on a disk.

Earlier today, migration assistant happily transferred all my data from my Time Machine backup disk. Now, it sees the disk, recognizes that it’s Time Machine backups, but when I select the disk and click continue then button is greyed out and the application never progresses. I have no idea why, or even how, this could happen. I’ve not turned up not a single instance where someone’s described this issue.

Does anyone have any ideas for how to get migration assistant to function? Does anyone have any ideas how I can manually retrieve all my files from the backups?
Photo of where the application gets stuck Attached.

 

[chrishadaflavor]

I can see the individual backups on the Time Machine drive, and even access /Users/me/ but can not access the directories under my home (Documents, Downloads, etc) which is what I really need. This is after unlocking the drive with my password. The one promising lead I have is from the snow leopard days, running Finder as root to invoke Time Machine and manually collecting files.

 

[Macroe]

"The one promising lead I have is from the snow leopard days, running Finder as root to invoke Time Machine and manually collecting files."

Hi Chris,
I see you have had an idea and I am wondering if the following worked? & how to do that as well?

 

[chrishadaflavor]

"The one promising lead I have is from the snow leopard days, running Finder as root to invoke Time Machine and manually collecting files."

Hi Chris,
I see you have had an idea and I am wondering if the following worked? & how to do that as well?

it turned out to be easier (once I realized what I wanted was impossible). If you know the encryption password for the Time Machine drive, you can navigate to the latest backup and use rsync to a non-APFS drive to retrieve your files from the backup. The non-APFS drive is important, I think, to get rid of the permissions embedded in the Time Machine drive structure. Once you have your file copies, you rsync those to the Mac drive, which worked fine.