I have a failed external drive. I have a backup on my TM
drive. When I try to restore it tells me it will erase the internal drive. If I
try to restore just one file I get: “” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s
required by macOS.” How do I recover my files?
iMac 27″, macOS 10.15
I'm not trying to replace a file.
Anyway, I created a new boot drive just for this purpose, booted from it and then restored most of what I need to that , then copied it to where I wanted it.
Tedious, and a silly way to have to go about things, but it got most of what I wanted done.
Hi byomtov,
Try this article/steps: Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support.
Cheers,
Jack
Restore your Mac from a backup
"Learn how to transfer all files from your Time Machine backup to your Mac.
If you used Time Machine to create a backup of your Mac, you can restore your files from that backup." Either just data files, or all files including the operating system.
Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
http://support.apple.com/HT201262
See if starting in Safe Mode helps, though I am not sure if that will also disable Time Machine too.
If you know which service is using the file you may be able to kill the process in Activity Monitor. Hopefully it isn't something critical in keeping you system running though. :-/
A file that is in use can't be replaced. You need to figure out why it is in use. From your last post it seems it is just a plain data file, in which case quit the app that's using it.
Thank you, but this article is not helpful.
Apparently TM will only restore to my system drive, and asks that it be erased if I try to do a complete restore. I would prefer to restore to my external drive.
If I try to do one folder at a time I get the message given above.
Safe mode didn't help.
My fundamental question is this:
Is it possible to restore files from a Time Machine backup and direct them someplace other than the boot drive?
It seems that that should be easy but there doesn't seem to be a way o do it. The files were on an external disk that failed and I don't want them on the boot drive for several reasons, not least that I have limited space there.
Thank you, but this doesn't solve the specific problem I have.
Restore files from failed drive
