I can’t for the life of me find any info on the process of restoring images to Mac or Linux machines. I understand Windows gets a bootable USB, but how does this work for the other platforms?
I run a real estate office predominantly using Windows machines but it’s not uncommon for agents to prefer to use Macs or already have their own.
Also, how would one use the image backups to restore without a network connection if needed?
I want to say that this is an incredible piece of software. Its biggest downside is that the documentation is severely lacking and heavily outdated in sections (internet/active client). It took me days to get LDAP working and to learn how to properly get a reverse proxy + web socket working for internet clients, or even learn it supported web sockets. Now that I’m set up though, this is fantastic!
This is all a bit of a theoretical-but-generally-well-informed answer - I’ve never used image backups with Urbackup on the Mac - but I have worked with many other Mac restoration situations.
In general, with recent versions of macOS, you can’t restore an entire system from any image backup which hasn’t been produced with Apple’s own system restore tool: the system volume is signed by the OS installer, and nothing else can produce a valid signature for this.
Consequently your restoration process is likely going to look like this:
Restore your image backup onto an external USB drive;
Erase the Mac back to its bare-bones OS installation. How to do this will vary depending on which OS you’re running (some have a specific reset function, some require wiping and reinstalling the OS from scratch;
Run the Mac’s Migration Assistant to migrate the restored data from the external USB drive onto the internal system drive.
There may be reasons why this process won’t work - but that’s my best guess as to a successful image restore. Hope that’s helpful!