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Restoring from a disk image

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You can access the contents of a disk image the same way that you access other volumes and external hard drives on macOS. Double-click on the disk image file to mount its filesystem, then navigate the filesystem in the Finder to access individual files and folders. If you have the permission to access the files that you would like to restore, simply drag those items to the volume that you would like to restore them to.

Restoring individual items or an entire disk image to another hard drive using CCC

To restore files or an entire filesystem from a disk image:

  1. Open CCC
  2. Drag the disk image file onto CCC's Source selector. CCC will mount the disk image for you.
  3. Choose a volume from the Destination selector. You may not choose the current startup disk as a destination, however you may choose to restore to a folder on the current startup disk.
  4. If you do not want to restore everything, click the Task Filter button and define a filter to exclude any content that you do not wish to restore.
  5. Click the Start button.

Using Migration Assistant to migrate data from a disk image

If you have a clean installation of macOS and want to restore your user data from a full-system backup on a disk image, you can use Migration Assistant for this task. Starting with a fresh installation of macOS:

  1. Decline the initial Migration Assistant offer.
  2. Proceed to create a new "dummy" account, log in to the new account.
  3. Attach the external storage or mount the NAS volume that has your disk image file.
  4. Double-click the disk image file to mount the disk image volume.
  5. Open System Settings > General > Transfer or Reset.
  6. Click Open Migration Assistant…
  7. When prompted, select the mounted disk image volume as the source to the migration.

Note that Migration Assistant will only accept a disk image that has a full system backup or a whole Data volume backup, it will not accept a collection of user data (e.g. just a user home folder).

Migration Assistant and the CCC SafetyNet

If your backup volume has a "_CCC SafetyNet" folder, you can move that folder to the Trash before using Migration Assistant to avoid copying that folder during a migration. This is particularly important if that folder has a lot of data in it and you're migrating to a disk that is smaller than the backup volume. If you would like to retain the SafetyNet folder on the backup volume, don't empty the Trash. After Migration Assistant has completed, then you can move the SafetyNet folder back to the root of the backup volume.