So, I’ve been biting my nails the past week, that was ever since i decided that i want a bigger hard drive. And finally i can stop now, because i got my notebook back and i got time machine to do a “full” system restore, from an unsupported volume! I’m so relieved… and this means, that all of you that have NAS and File servers need no longer cry or worry, let me be yet another person to confirm that it can be done. And let me be the first to show you… how 
My configuration
Just in case you were wondering what configuration i used, and continue to use for that matter 
Here it is:
- Debian Etch
- Self-compiled netatalk (for Leopard compatibility) here’s a good howto.
- 330GB Volume on Raid5 formatted ext3
So, if you have the first two you’re in business, but even if you don’t use netatalk. All you have to do is mount everything as described in “Mounting”.
Setting up the Harddrive
Now first things first, boot from your cd. To do that just press and hold the c-key immediately after powering on your computer. You should eventually be greeted by a language selection etc. After all of this you will be welcomed by the installer. We don’t need it at all. At the top you will see “Utilities”, where you will find among others Disk Utility, Terminal and Restore from a Time Machine Backup.You will probably want to start off, especially if its a new harddrive by checking out Disk Utility and creating any volumes you want to install your system. After you have them configured your pretty much ready to go.
Network and Jumbo Frames
So now you should connect make sure you are connect to your network. You can open up disk utility to check connectivity. If you need anything special, like setting up specific network settings, these can be done in terminal. I for example like to have jumbo frames, since all my gigabit devices support it. Open up Terminal from the utilities menu, and type.ifconfig en0 mtu 9000and you should be set.
Mounting the Volumes
Let me reitterate that I have not yet tested anything other than netatalk (afp), but this should for any network file sharing protocol. All you have to do is mount your Time Machine volume under /Volumes. The syntax for mounting an afp share ismount -t afp afp://username:password@hostname/ShareNameImportant here is to remember that the ShareName is a case-sensitive string. So make sure you type \ before a space, and to check for proper capitalization. Otherwise you get some mount errors, which occur because a volume wasn’t found with that name, since the actual name doesn’t match the one you typed. ShareMount is any string you want, it doesn’t matter what you call it. Same goes for spaces here. If you mount your afp volume just /Volumes (i.e. without ShareMount) you might see multiple TMBackups, as is the case with the images bellow. Still works, just shocking to see 2 of the same thing. Thats basically it, you’re almost done…
/Volumes/ShareMount
Restoring…
Before you close Terminal, make sure the share actually mounted properly, you can simply ls /Volumes and see if your mount is there. If you didn’t mount it at /Volumes/ShareMount your /Volumes folder might be litered with the contents of your afp volume, this shouldn’t cause any problems, just doesn’t look neat at first site. If everything seems to be there, then select “Restore from a Time Machine Backup” from Utilities. Click through the menu and you will come to a screen called “Select a Backup Source”, with your shares appearing properly and being recognized. Don’t ask me why there are two, probably because MacOS in general uses a lot of symlinks… Anyway, important thing is that it works. Select the first volume, and after selecting the you will come to a screen called “Select a Backup”, where you get to chose which backup you wish to use. Afterwards, the system will calculate if there is enough space and will afterwards let you restore. This will now take some time and it went up for me after about 25mins, so don’t hesitate to let it sit there for 2-3 hours. Afterwards, you will just need to reboot, and you’ll be back where you left off.
Hey, I’ve seen this before!
One thing some will notice, is that things like Mail and Itunes, will need to reconfigure themselves, i.e. reimport all your emails. Having said that, I’m still blown away by how well this went over, even if this is “unsupported”. Oh and for those of you wondering how to backup to an unsupported volume in the first place, well its simple. All you have to do is:defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1Hope this helps some people, feel free to leave a comment.
And if you appreciate all my hard work, please feel free to donate:
stone
22 October 2008 at 8:28
I successfully restored my MacBook from a networked volume (residing on a Linux Gentoo server) as described by you. I did however have something that looked like a serious problem but has since “gone away”. Namely, after restore a lot applications would quit unexpectedly. After spotlight finished indexing and a reboot those problems disappeard.
Felix
29 January 2009 at 0:44
Thanks a lot for your post. I’d like to add one experience. I also successfully restored my MacBook Air from a “unsupported” backup. My backups were stored on a Windows 2003 Server. What I did was the following:
1. I mounted the Windows 2003 share and connected a external USB drive.
2. In terminal I changed into the directory of the mounted Windows 2003 volume (“cd /Volumes/W2K3-Share”)
3. I copied the sparsebundle using this command:
rsync -avE ComputerName_0016cbab5246.sparsebundle /Volumes/ExternalUSBDrive
(Change “ComputerName” “0016cbab5246″ and “ExternalUSBDrives” to your values.)
After that I was able to successfully restore the hard drive connecting the USB drive to the target computer. Other ways of copying didn’t do the trick.
I did this before I knew your page. Thanks again. I’ll try your method the next time. My way is just another way to accomplish the same thing you did.