How to restore your hard drive from a Time Machine backup
Whether you’re having major problems with your current hard drive or upgrading to a new Mac, Time Machine can help you get back to business.
- Power up your Mac and hold down the Command and R keys to enter the macOS Recovery Partition. Your Mac should boot to a screen that says macOS Utilities.
- Select Restore from Time Machine Backup and click Continue.
- Read the info on the Restore Your System page and click Continue.
- Select your Time Machine backup and click Continue.
- Select the most recent backup of your hard disk and click Continue. Your Mac will then restore the Time Machine backup; once it’s done it will restart.
If you’ve had to replace it with a stock drive that has nothing on it—not even macOS—you won’t be able to boot from the macOS Recovery Partition. But fear not, you can get the recovery rolling from the Time Machine backup disk itself: Just hold down the Option key when you start your Mac; you’ll be able to select the Time Machine backup disk as your startup drive, and go from there.
NB. I haven’t tested this yet, hopefully I’ll never have to. 