Last updated: 29 September 2020
I had to fix the Time Machine backup to restore my system. Editing the Time Machine backup to remove the dodgy folder was difficult. The solution (1) Initially I needed a Finder and Terminal window so I had to setup the new Mac as new with no user data (as a complete fresh install) so I could fully access the Time Machine backup to apply the.
I had a nightmare restoring from a Time Capsule backup. Eventually I found a little-documented solution.
- Can't Backup or Restore Your Mac Using Time Machine. One phenomenon to get Time Machine backup failed is that you can't back up or access an existing Time Machine backup, or restore from an earlier backup won't work.
- I am rather inclined to put the original disk back in, Time Machine backup to a local FW800 disk, then revert to the SSD & restore from that. I guess the restore would still take a long time (not to mention a full TM backup from scratch) but surely a lot quicker than 70 hours (please!).
- Time Machine won't back up external drive. Time Machine doesn't back up contents on the external device is by default. It backs up things on your internal drive. External devices are automatically excluded from time machine backup. To ensure the backup of external devices, you can: Click on the System Preferences Time Machine; Go to Options.
In Brief
– I was unable to restore from a Time Machine backup. Error: “An error occurred while restoring from the backup.” I found next to nothing online to solve this problem.
– The error log showed a “[RESTORE] critical failure (error: -5000…” for which there is no support online.
– The problem affected Time Machine backups on both a USB drive and an Apple Time Capsule.
– The solution is to identify the corrupted files in question and quarantine them (before optionally manually restoring them later).
– On Time Capsule backups, this solution is more complicated because of how the backups are saved and how difficult it is to edit them.
The problem
I was trying to restore my machine from a Time Machine backup to a new laptop in recovery mode.
A few hours into the restore (about three-quarters of the way through the data transfer) the restoration would always fail with “An error occurred while restoring from the backup.”
I retried the backup to no avail; I got the same error. On inspecting the log (Window -> Log Window), I saw that there was a “critical failure” that was not being handled gracefully by the Time Machine System Restore app in recovery mode. [Hat tip to drice99 for bringing the installer log to my attention, and Tom Fox for the photo below but one.]
In my case, the file or folder that I later found out was corrupted was a Mac App Store receipt folder for an application called “WiFi Signal”. It later turned out that this app would always (at least on my system) produce a corrupt “_MASReceipt/receipt” folder. My final solution was to completely delete the app and find an alternative so that my fresh Time Machine backups don’t get corrupted from this dodgy folder. But according to various user reports I’ve received via e-mail, this problem affects various apps.
I wasn’t able to take another backup from my old machine. I had to fix the Time Machine backup to restore my system. Editing the Time Machine backup to remove the dodgy folder was difficult.
The solution Remote desktop connection client for mac 2.1.1 download.
(1) Initially I needed a Finder and Terminal window so I had to setup the new Mac as new with no user data (as a complete fresh install) so I could fully access the Time Machine backup to apply the fix. Then I connected the backup to the Mac.
(2) In the case of the Time Capsule I had to first mount the backup:
• In Terminal, I ran these commands:
sudo su -
First we escalate our privileges.
hdiutil attach -readwrite -noverify -noautofsck /Volumes/TimeMachine/<my-backup>.sparsebundle
Then we mount the Time Capsule ‘sparse bundle’ as if it is a disk.
![Mac Mac](https://images.wondershare.com/recoverit/article/2020/03/time-machine-wont-backup-3.jpg)
• By now I had the Time Capsule Time Machine backup of my system mounted as if it was a USB drive Time Machine backup. (So you can skip this second step if you’re working with a USB drive and not a Time Capsule.)
Time Machine Restore Not Working
(3) Then I had to delete the problematic folder that was identified in the log:
I took a backup of the folder I was deleting and put it on a USB thumb drive.
Then in Terminal, I ran this command:
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/MacOS/bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/[disk]/Backups.backupdb/[path]
Time Machine Restore
NOTE: Since High Sierra the path of the bypass tool has changed, so use:
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/Helpers/bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/[disk]/Backups.backupdb/[path]
This command uses a Time Capsule ‘Safety Net’ feature that lets us ‘bypass’ restrictions and ‘remove’ (rm) the problematic folder.
To make this more easy to follow, he’s a real world example:
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/Helpers/bypass rm -rfv /Volumes/Backups/Backups.backupdb/Harry's Mac/2018-03-01-095034/Macintosh HD/Users/harryfear/Library/Application Support/WiFi Signal/_MASRreceipt
Note that where your path has apostrophes and spaces (such as with Apple computer names like Harry’s Mac), you’ll have to escape those characters by putting a backslash before them as I did above. So, …/John’s iMac/… becomes …/John’s iMac/…
In cases where you receive error “Operation not permitted” on trying the above command in Terminal on MacOS, please try running the same command (without sudo at the beginning) in MacOS Recovery Mode instead and use the Terminal app there.
(4) Then go back into Recovery mode on the Mac and reattempt to restore from the modified backup.
Let me know if it doesn’t work.
A client located in Greenwich Village had a Mac Time Machine problem.
She had a MacBook Pro and the hard drive simply stopped working. Our family elephant picture. Luckily she was fully backed up thanks to Time Machine and Time Capsule. As the computer was still under AppleCare warranty, she took it to the Apple Store Soho, where they replaced the drive at no cost.
But when she got back home and attempted to restore her data from her Time Machine backup to the new drive inside her computer, she had a problem. Time Machine wouldn’t restore because the version of the OS before her computer died was OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, so that’s what was on her Time Machine–but the Apple Store only put OS X 10.5 Leopard on the replacement hard drive, because that’s what her MacBook Pro shipped with originally.
So she called us for help. We provided her with phone and email instructions so she could fix the problem herself; here’s how she did it.
- She found her Snow Leopard installer DVD and inserted it into her Mac.
- She connected her Time Machine drive or Time Capsule to her Mac via ethernet cable.
- She restarted the computer while holding down the C key, to force the computer to boot off the DVD installer instead of the internal hard drive.
- Once the system started up (which takes awhile, since remember it’s booting off a DVD) she clicked on the Utilities menu at the top, and selected Restore System from Backup.
- Then she selected her Time Machine backup as the source of her backup, and then selected her internal hard drive as her destination and clicked Restore.
Her entire Time Machine backup was restored to her new hard drive.