Now being one of those “jump first and realize what I did later” people, I jumped into a server upgrade confident of my ability to restore from a Time Machine Backup. Our setup here is a Drobo FS and a few headless Mac Pros. Now all of this seemed reasonable to me, and as might be expected the upgrade from the 10.7 server to 10.8 was a complete failure since I couldn’t for the life of me, drag across the wiki. So, after struggling for some time I acquiesced and decided to restore from my backup.

Right…

It turns out that restoring from a NAS like the Drobo FS is not as straight forward as hoped. I popped in the install usb that I carry around and dropped into the restore form Time Machine option and off the software went to search and search, and search.

Nothing. No networked backups appeared. So it was off to Google and this solution by Urban Toronto. Oddly or perhaps predictably, terminal saves the day… again.

So next time, just so I remember:

Create a mount point on the target disk:

 mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine

Mount the network share to this newly created volume:

mount -t afp afp://YourDroboFSAdminUserName:YourDroboFSAdminPassword@IPAddressOfDrobo/YourDroboTimeMachineShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

Finally mount the actual image of your Time Machine backup to make its contents readable:

hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/yourMacsTimeMachineFile.sparsebundle

If you don’t know the name of your sparsebundle image, just cd into your /Volumes/TimeMachine directory and use ls to look it up.