Hold down Command + R while your Mac is restarting to bring up the startup options screen. Restart your Mac and enter recovery mode during the boot process.Connect the hard drive containing your backup to your Mac.To restore your Mac from an external hard drive with a Time Machine backup, follow these steps: How to Restore Your Mac from an External Hard Drive with a Time Machine Backup Here are our best suggestions for cases like these, including situations where you need to recover data from the drive itself. That way, you won’t have to waste any valuable time when you need to rescue your data one day. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the process in advance. Knowing how to restore your Mac from an external hard drive can come in great handy if you ever run into this unfortunate situation. How to Restore a Mac from an External Hard Drive Creating a proper backup solution is highly individual and everybody has their own requirements, which makes it important to study your situation in as much detail as possible before committing to a solution. In this case, you might want to focus on spreading your backups to other locations like cloud services.

Of course, this can get expensive if you have a lot of data. If possible, keep multiple backups to maximize your protection. It’s impossible to predict when this will happen, which is why you shouldn’t rely on an external USB drive too much as your single point of recovery. Some drives will simply stop working after a few years have passed.

This is rare, but if you happen to unplug the drive right as it’s being written to, you may end up corrupting the file system to an extent that your computer doesn’t recognize the drive any longer.Īge is also a contributing factor.

You may also lose data from your external hard drive by not disconnecting it correctly. It’s surprisingly common that people simply forget they have valuable data on the drive and end up deleting it. Accidentally erasing or formatting the drive is perhaps one of the most common cases. You may lose data from your external hard drive for a number of reasons. Use a disk-checking tool or a recovery tool like Disk Utility

Ssd external hard drive time machine