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Full Time Machine Restore Failure 6.10.8
The crux is that the ReadyNAS Time Machine configuration let me down exactly at the time when I needed it. My mac crashed and the only way to get it back up was to wipe the hard drive.
During the OS Re-install it asks for your Time Machine backup to restore from. For the ReadyNAS, all the Time Machine backups showed as "Mount failed". (This is the Apple Installer GUI. There are no logs to diagnose a problem like this.)
I skipped past that and completed the re-install of the OS. After that you can use Apple's Migration Assistant to restore from Time Machine. That takes you to the same installer screen and leads to the same "Mount failed" messages.
Previous to the crash I was able to view all the Time Machine backups by holding down the Option key while viewing the Time Machine menu then choose Browse Other Backups. This no longer works.
Eventually, by using the command line utility called hdiutil and the Time Machine menu to go to the backup browser (which showed no backups) and various system reboots, I was able to mount my backups. This took hours of dinking around while most of the time the hdiutil attach command failed to mount the backups. I'm not sure what combination of activity allowed it to eventually mount. I think the recipe is reboot, browse for backups, detach backup folder from command line, re-attach backup folder, use finder to browse to snapshot.
Once the backups are mounted you can navigate into each snapshot and pull the files out. This has serious pitfalls because, for a full restore, you want system files restored and these are permission-restricted and hard to safely restore in an ad hoc fashion, ie without the help of Migration Assistant.
In the end I expect a partially restored system which should, at least, include all my user files.
After I have my Mac in usable condition again I'll set up Time Machine backups to a fresh folder on the NAS and try to run Migration Assistant to see if it works any better.
This is for the latest Mac OS: Sonoma 14.3
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It turns out "the second time is the charm." The recipe to restore from ReadyNAS TM Backup is to reboot the Mac, run Migration Assistant once, which leads to the "Mount Failed" error, then quit Migration Assistant and run it a second time. The second time it is able to mount the backup volume. The first time it fails quickly, the second time it takes a while (5-10 minutes) before it successfully mounts the volume.
It is restoring my Mac now, predicting it will take 8 hours. If I don't report back then my restore was successful.
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