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I took the backup of my system on Time Machine disk , at that time it was running Mac Big Sur. Now i want to restore the data on Mac Capitan but its not Recognising the external hard drive.

Do i need to upgrade it to Big sur and then try restoration of data or it's possible on Capitan.

The disk is visible at Disk Utility section, but cannot be accessible.

Hope to see the solution soon.

Thank you in advance.

Shushanto
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1 Answers1

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Your disk is probably formatted with APFS which wasn't fully supported until High Sierra. Time Machine itself used the HFS+ format until Catalina, only in Big Sur will Time Machine use APFS.

If the disk is APFS you need a High Sierra or new OS to mount the disk. Even having achieved that you may only be able to access the Time Machine backup manually. If the backup is a "remote" backup and is in a sparsebundle image you can double-click to mount it, if the extension is backupbundle change it to sparsebundle and it will mount.

Copying out your files is easy up to Catalina. Under Big Sur your backup disc may look empty as Apple has made entires invisible. To address that use the Terminal to move to the disc (in /Volumes) and you will probably find you can open the hidden folder back in the Finder (using open <folder> in Terminal).

HTH

CRD
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  • It means if i upgrade my system to Big Sur, then it will recognise the hard drive and i will be able to restore my data ? – Shushanto Apr 27 '21 at 08:12
  • Yes, a Big Sur system should read a Big Sur Time Machine backup. Also any system from High Sierra should be able to read the disk itself and enable you to at least copy off your files manually (i.e. not using a Time Machine restore). Upgrading from El Capitan to Big Sur is a big step, make sure you've versions of all your apps. that will work, and can upgrade document versions in one step, before making that step – e.g. there is no longer 32-bit app support, and current versions of Pages only read files back so many versions; such things may not impact you but check twice and upgrade once! HTH – CRD Apr 27 '21 at 09:27