I restarted the machine and went to get a drink. Repair failed! After being told that Disk Utility couldn't fix my drive and that I would have to restore my computer from a backup, I was pretty frustrated.
As any technician would, I booted to my diagnostic drive and tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility. So, I didn't have a good backup, my clone was old and now my computer wouldn't boot into the operating system - it just hung at the spinning gear.
#Mac time machine restore progress bar manual
I always suggest having a manual clone as a backup to your backup. Also, as much as I love Time Machine, in my profession, I've seen several instances where Time Machine backups don't restore properly. The cloned drive is kept in a fireproof safe here in my house. I usually keep a continuous Time Machine backup of everything and clone my internal drive every couple weeks. Many thoughts went through my head: I've lost the last month's worth of work, I have to waste hours trying to recover data from my drive, why did this have to happen while I was trying to back it up? It goes to show that it can happen to anyone at any time and that the only real solution is to keep a current backup (if not several) of all your information. Ridiculously enough, I hadn't kept up any of my backups in a month and I hard powered off the machine while it was booting because I forgot to select the boot drive (yes - I'm a technician and I did something dumb - I know). The moral of my story: backup frequently and try not to turn off your Mac while it is starting up.įive days ago, I was prepping my late 2008 MacBook Pro for resale when I encountered the ever-spinning gear at boot. Here's a story for anyone who's come across an unusual progress bar during boot and my best guess at what it really is.
#Mac time machine restore progress bar update
We will update you if we find a support article with more information.
Here's an older Apple support article that explains the disk repair process very well. Update: As several of our commenters pointed out, the OS is probably running the fsck utility in the background to repair directory problems, while showing the progress bar to the end user so they know there's something going on (fsck can take quite a while).