Restoring data from TimeMachine on older MacOS

[rjalex]

Dear friends,
my late 2009 iMac was on High Sierra but it really slowed down things. This machine had a FW external HDD for TimeMachine.

Internal HDD broke so just fixed inserting a new HDD and decided to install a fresh Sierra (not High Sierra) MacOS.

When I connected the FW external TimeMachine it is recognised but when I enter it even though on the right I see the expected snapshots going back to April 2017, they are in RED and the up and down arrows to go back in time are greyed out.

Is there a way to restore my home folder data files without having to upgrade to High Sierra? I am only interested in data, not in Apps or system files.

Thank you

 

[FreemanW]

I will venture a guess that you have not lost any data but it will be a circuitous recovery process.

You will have to go with macOS High Sierra to restore the user data you want to get your hands on. Once you have it extricated from the Time Machine backup image, copy all of that data to another volume, external hard drive or cloud storage.

Then you can go about getting Sierra back up and running, then go get the data.

 

[rjalex]

I am afraid you are right :-( That's painful !!! So next time the lesson is: do not entrust an OS level independent backup to TimeMachine but backup to a regular filesystem!!! That's an hard lesson.

As a side question. I did format reinstall this new HDD from an USB key and it was quite slow. Anything I can do before I upgrade do HighSierra to be able to go back to Sierra quicker?

Maybe using one of those CarbonCopy or similar to make a snapshot now, then upgrade, then restore user files, then backup them and then restore the CarbonCopy snapshot ?

Thank you very much.

 

[FreemanW]

Ah, sorry for the slow response.

Yes!

CarbonCopyCloner can be absolutely indispensable.

I've got macOS Sierra and (I think) Mavericks on two different WD MyBook 3TB drives sitting on the desk next to my iMac. Both are bootable volumes . . . . and both could "hypothetically" be used to clone back to my 3TB Fusion drive in my late 2012 iMac.

The Sierra has been quite useful as of late. My Canon Pixma MX860 has had support pulled from underneath it by operating system updates. I've needed to scan various documents and High Sierra no longer recognizes such an old All-In-One. Booting to Sierra takes care of the issue and allows me to scan and save PDF product to the internal drive on the iMac. Then I just reboot to the iMac and I'm golden.

Yeah, sooner or later I'm gonna have to buckle under and pull the trigger on a new All-In-One.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Maybe using one of those CarbonCopy or similar to make a snapshot now, then upgrade, then restore user files, then backup them and then restore the CarbonCopy snapshot ?"

I suggest you use CarbonCopyCloner instead of Time Machine.
Things will go much better.
CCC is FREE to download and try for 30 days.