Plurrrr

Thu 05 Sep 2019

Restoring an iTunes backup from an external disk

In the evening I restored a backup of my iPhone and iPad (the latter got stolen in a break in into our house over a year ago) to my Mac Mini 2014 running macOS Mojave. I had made this backup on an external disk prior to doing a clean install of macOS Mojave.

I assumed that restoring would be a simple rsync -avh but it turns out that in Mojave and above one has to grant full disk access to the terminal in order to be able to write to the correct location.

Granting full disk access to the Terminal application
Granting full disk access to the Terminal application.

After I had granted access to the terminal application via the Security & Privacy section in System Settings I could use rsync and several minutes later the backup was restored.

Note that I recommend to revoke the full disk access rights from the terminal application when done.