Hackintosh from Start to Finish: Restoring from a Time Machine Backup

One of the most common questions I get asked is regarding Time Machine backups. A lot of people have been asking if it's possible to restore from a Time Machine backup on a Hackintosh. I'm here to tell you that this is indeed possible, however there is just one minor curve ball in the process. I recommend all Hackintosh users take advantage of Time Machine. This is the easiest way to make sure that you never lose a single file when installing kexts to your system.

Before we move on, here's what you're going to need to make this work:

• Backup drive with at least one Time machine backup
• A bootloader of your choice to boot into OS X and install to the OS drive

Once you have both the bootloader and your Time Machine ready, plug both into your machine and restart. Once you're at your computer's BIOS screen, make sure that you boot from your bootloader image, whether that be a USB drive or a CD. From there, simply boot into the Mac OS X installer as if you're about to do a clean installation of Mac OS X. Accept the licensing terms  and click the Utilities menu at the top, selecting "Restore System from Backup". You will then be greeted with the "Restore your System" screen.

Click through the menus and select the Time Machine drive that has the backup that you want to restore from. You'll then need to select the time and date of the backup that you want to restore to. Most times, this will be either of the top two choices, depending on your reasons to restore. Once you do that, select the disk that you want to restore to, which will likely be your main OS drive. If you have Time Machine backing up multiple hard drives, those will not be restored here. You can manually restore those once you've booted back into OS X. Now that you've selected the drive to restore to, you can sit back and let Time Machine wind back the clock!

You'll want to leave your bootloader installed in your machine, as we'll be needing it one last time. Once the restore has completed, your computer will restart itself. At the BIOS screen, be sure to boot into your bootloader device again, this time selecting the OS X partition. Now that you're back into OS X, everything should be just the way you left it. The only thing to do now is to re-install the bootloader to the OS drive. The reason we have to do this is because Time Machine backups don't restore the bootloader. Therefore, we need to manually re-install it in order to boot in to OS X automatically on start up.

That's all there is to the process! I hope this helped you if you have been wondering about Time Machine backups on a hackintosh. For more tutorials and other tech content, be sure to check me out on YouTube and Twitter. My "Hackintosh From Start to Finish" series will be frequently updated with various tips requested by you! If you have a suggestion for a video to be added to the series, don't be afraid to contact me.