It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the process in advance. Knowing how to restore your Mac from an external hard drive can come in great handy if you ever run into this unfortunate situation. How to Restore a Mac from an External Hard Drive Creating a proper backup solution is highly individual and everybody has their own requirements, which makes it important to study your situation in as much detail as possible before committing to a solution. In this case, you might want to focus on spreading your backups to other locations like cloud services. Of course, this can get expensive if you have a lot of data. If possible, keep multiple backups to maximize your protection. It’s impossible to predict when this will happen, which is why you shouldn’t rely on an external USB drive too much as your single point of recovery. Some drives will simply stop working after a few years have passed. This is rare, but if you happen to unplug the drive right as it’s being written to, you may end up corrupting the file system to an extent that your computer doesn’t recognize the drive any longer.Īge is also a contributing factor. You may also lose data from your external hard drive by not disconnecting it correctly. It’s surprisingly common that people simply forget they have valuable data on the drive and end up deleting it. Accidentally erasing or formatting the drive is perhaps one of the most common cases. You may lose data from your external hard drive for a number of reasons. It’s a bit more trouble, but does get you the cleanest new install possible.Use a disk-checking tool or a recovery tool like Disk Utility That way, I’ve got a fresh start, and can still get back any of the old stuff anytime if I want. Personally I restored just main folders (Documents, Dropbox and such), then brought just the apps I knew I wanted to use and left everything else on the Time Machine drive. If you want to just get your files and not your settings, you can drag over just your individual user folders, or copy over the applications you want. Now browse through the folders and find what you want to restore. Or, grab an older version if you're really sure that's what you want. Just open your Time Machine drive in Finder, browse to your Mac's folder, and select the “Latest” link to open the last backup folder. You can also easily selectively restore files from just the folders you want.

But you've got to get your old files back on your new (or newly wiped and reinstalled) Mac, and automatically restoring from Time Machine is the easiest and most obvious way to do so. There’s something about that new MacBook smell, that clean feeling of having an original OS X install with no clutter or cruft. Selective Restore a Mac From a Time Machine Backup

Selective Restore a Mac From a Time Machine Backup | Techinch tech, simplified.

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