How to Restore Mac from External Hard Drive with Time Machine or Not

It is a good habit to back up Mac data regularly with an external hard drive or cloud service. Thus, when your Mac computer is disabled or crashed, you can restore Mac from external hard drive to fix data loss issues. Of course, not all stored files can be recovered on Mac. But you can get back most previous Mac files thanks to the recent external hard drive backup at least.

The Mac data recovery process depends on which backup method you use. Thus, this article introduces several ways to recover files from external hard drive on Mac in different scenarios. Just read and follow.

Now, let's read together to recover Seagate files easily.

Restore Mac from External Hard Drive

• Part 1: How to Restore Mac from the Latest Time Machine Backup
• Part 2: How to Restore Mac from External Hard Drive with Local Backup
• Part 3: How to Restore Mac from a Cloud Backup Service
• Part 4: If Your External Hard Drive Fails, You Can Restore Data on Mac with Data Recovery Safely

Part 1: How to Restore Mac from the Latest Time Machine Backup

If you have backed up Mac with Time Machine, you can enter into Recovery mode to restore MacBook from external hard drive. Well, some unsaved and not backed up files cannot be recovered completely while restoring from a Time Machine backup.

Step 1 Connect the Time Machine backup disk to Mac. Turn it on. Later, restart your Mac computer.

Step 2 Mark before "From a Mac, Time Machine backup, or startup disk" in the "Migration Assistant" window. Click "Continue" to move on.

Step 3 Choose your Time Machine backup. Then click "Continue" to continue the process.

Step 4 Select the file with the latest date and time from various Time Machine backups. Later, click "Continue".

Step 5 Choose which information you'd like to transfer to Mac. Wait for a while to restore Mac from Time Machine external hard drive.

For more details of restoring data from Time Machine, visit it here.

Part 2: How to Restore Mac from External Hard Drive with Local Backup

If you use Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner or other cloning programs to clone Mac for a backup, you can restore Mac from external hard drive too. In addition, you can even create a bootable installer to get the cloned backup on Mac.

Step 1 Plug the cloned external hard drive to Mac. Then restart the Mac.

Step 2 Hold and press "Command" and "R" keys while the startup disc is waking up. You will be in the macOS Utilities window.

Step 3 Choose "Disk Utility" followed by "Continue".

Step 4 Select the Mac hard drive.

Step 5 Click "Restore" and then select the external hard drive that contains your cloned backup besides "Restore from".

Step 6 Choose your Mac' hard drive next to "Restore to". At last, click "Restore" to restore Mac from external hard drive without Time Machine.

Part 3: How to Restore Mac from a Cloud Backup Service

It is also supported to back up Mac with cloud-based backup services, like Backblaze, CrashPlan, etc. During this time, you can restore Mac from its physical external hard drive or remote server. It depends on the online backup service you use. Well, you can also launch the remote app or visit its official site to restore Mac from cloud backup.

Part 4: If Your External Hard Drive Fails, You Can Restore Data on Mac with Data Recovery Safely

What if your external hard drive suffers from virus attack, formatting, crashes and many other problems? Is it possible to recover data from corrupted external hard drive on Mac? Fortunately, you can recover almost all deleted or lost files from Mac or the connected external hard drive by using Aiseesoft Data Recovery. You can rescue Mac data from various data loss situations in a short time. Well, you can perform hard drive recovery, partition recovery and more with Data Recovery effortlessly.

Main Features of Mac Data Recovery Software

• Recover photos, videos, audios, emails, documents and more from your external hard drive on Mac selectively.
• Support external hard drive recovery due to overwritten, deletion, formatted partition, RAW hard drive and other hard drive problems.
• Scan, preview and filter any recoverable data with fast speed.
• The data recovery software works with Mac 10.7 and above (macOS Sonoma included).

How to Restore Data from a Corrupted External Hard Drive on Mac

Step 1 Launch hard drive recovery software on Mac. Then plug the corrupted external hard drive into Mac properly. The program will recognize it immediately.

Step 2 Select the data type and external hard drive based on your need. You can find your connected external hard drive under "Removable Drives". Later, click "Scan" to start the Quick Scan mode by default.

Step 3 Open one folder that contains your lost data in the left pane. Both deleted and existing files can be found within Mac data recovery software. You can double-click the file to enter into the Preview window.

Step 4 Click the mark box before the file you want to recover. At last, click "Recover" to recover Mac data from corrupted external hard drive.

It is very easy to perform the external hard drive recovery on Windows computer. For Mac users, the steps are slightly different. Follow this page to do a hard drive recovery on Mac from internal and extrenal drive.

Conclusion

Be aware that you had better not save the recovered data to the previous data lost place in case of data overwritten. Consequently, you can recover deleted partition on external hard drive on Mac with Data Recovery easily too. That's all for how to restore Mac from external hard drive. If you have any other questions, just feel free to contact us.