Easen.co.uk The home of Marc Easen

How to restore from a TimeMachine backup that is stored on a NAS

I'm now on my 3rd new MacBook Air (1st suffered creaking noises and the 2nd blew up in a puff of electrical smoke) and having just restored it from a TimeMachine backup, I thought it would be the right time to document how this was done when you're using a NAS running afpd as your backup storage. The NAS in question is a rooted Netgear Stora running a custom build of afpd configured to support OS X Lion login and TimeMachine.

1. Restart and hold down option
2. Select use Safari and open up this web page and remember the following steps
3. Quit Safari, open up Terminal from the Utilities menu and run
4. Mount the TimeMachine share
   1. mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
   2. mount_afp aftp://<username>:<password>@<host>/TimeMachine /Volumes/TimeMachine
   3. ls -l /Volumes/TimeMachine

   mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
   mount_afp aftp://<username>:<password>@<host>/TimeMachine /Volumes/TimeMachine
   ls -l /Volumes/TimeMachine

5. Now run the following to mount the sparsebundle
   1. mkdir /Volumes/Backup
   2. hdiutil mount -owners on -mountrandom /Volumes/Backup -stdinpass /Volumes/TimeMachine/*.sparsebundle
   3. ls -l /Volumes/Backup

   mkdir /Volumes/Backup
   hdiutil mount -owners on -mountrandom /Volumes/Backup -stdinpass /Volumes/TimeMachine/*.sparsebundle
   ls -l /Volumes/Backup

6. Quit Terminal
7. Select restore and select TimeMachine drive, your TimeMachine backup should be visible