Help restoring a non time machine backup.

[flyersman]

Hey all,

So my old macbook pro got damaged and I had a best buy extended warranty, they did a 100% backup of my hard drive, including system folders, and just gave me a new computer with the external hard drive. Now, they didn't do a Time Machine backup, so I just have an external harddrive with everything on it, Library, my home foler, etc. Is there any way I can 100% restore my new macbook from this? I opened migration assistant and selected restore from another disk but it isnt finding the external hard drive (but finder does find it.)

Please let me know how I can do a 100% restore even though it isnt in time machine format.

Thanks!

 

[oldmanmac]

If you can boot from that external drive,then you can install Super Duper or another cloning program and clone your old HD over to your new one.

 

[djackmac]

Looks like they just did a drag and drop backup, so migration assistant won't do anything with that. You'll have to drag and drop the contents of the individual folders inside your user folder to the individual folders on the new user account. That means taking everything inside the pictures folder backup into the pictures folder on the new user account, then desktop, music, etc.. Your iphoto/itunes libraries have all the metadata stored in those individual folders so they should be fine. The part you need to be really careful about is the items in the user/library folder. That part you will need to know which pieces to drag over and NOT just willy-nilly drag the entire contents and just drop into the newly created user/library folder, because things like mail, safari bookmarks and many other preferences will be hosed or unrestored. As far as applications are concerned its best to reload from the disks.

This is why you should have an Apple specialist do the work on your machine because they know how do do a proper image of the drive and restore everything back just as it was before.