MOTUnation.com

So an OS minor update the other day finally killed an NVME kext I had that allowed third party NVME drives to be read by Sierra. Thing is Time machine does not roll back minor updates it seams, can't go back to 10.12.4 from 10.12.5, so the NVME drive is still invisible to the OS. The clincher? Time Machine still seems to be backing it up, the data is on the 2TB HD, the folder for the NVME SSD is there.

Is there a way to get Time machine to copy that data to another drive? One of the problems with this seems to be that Time Machine can read the raw data but without a kext allowing third party m.2 NVME drives to be read, the OS itself ignores the drive, doesn't show up in disk Utility etc.

Learned my lesson for sure, carbon Copy Cloner at the least before updating. Fortunately only factory sample libraries were on that SSD in case this happened, so nothing is lost except time.

In case anyone else experiences something similar. So far it seems that Time Machine backs up the entire hard drive, so just dragging it's contents was possible.

What TM will do is restore your entire system to a particular date and time. If you installed 10.12.5 last Wednesday, you can restore your Mac as it was the day before.

It can also restore an app you (or I) sent to the trash to the day before. I decided to upgrade instead of a new install. It will ask if you want the older version only or to keep both? I went through this yesterday.

mikehalloran wrote:What TM will do is restore your entire system to a particular date and time. If you installed 10.12.5 last Wednesday, you can restore your Mac as it was the day before.

It can also restore an app you (or I) sent to the trash to the day before. I decided to upgrade instead of a new install. It will ask if you want the older version only or to keep both? I went through this yesterday.

It would not restore the new IONVMeFamily.kext to the earlier version, or the OS to the earlier version. i.e. it would not restore 10.12.5 to 10.12.4

It's possible of course that I have some odd hard to fix permissions issue going on, I do not know if it's an intentional part of the restoration process, but in terms of Time Machine it would restore everything to earlier versions, but the OS update itself.

It would not restore the new IONVMeFamily.kext to the earlier version, or the OS to the earlier version. i.e. it would not restore 10.12.5 to 10.12.4

*It wouldn't offer to erase your hard drive and restore your Mac to an earlier date? Odd, the only time I ever had a problem with that was when I tried it in OS 10.9.4 due to a bug that was resolved in 10.9.5.

You can do that by booting into the Repair Partition.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314





There is a workaround — it's just as time consuming. You need an installer for 10.12.4 or earlier and a recent Time Machine backup plus a copy of the old .kxt. Doesn't matter which version of Sierra as long as it's older than 10.12.5 (all of the Combo Updaters are still online). If someone has the installer, it must be zipped first, then decompressed on your Mac or it might not run.

Unfortunately, I trashed a 10.12.3 installer last week to reuse the SDHC card it was on.

Thanks for the cool information.

I think though I'm just going to sell this NVME SSD and get the AHCI version that will not require me to use Hackintosh community modified .kext extensions to get the OS to see it.

The thing is brutally fast, but the NVME thing isn't going away anytime soon, the Mac Pro towers are a small part of their user base, and Apple have no real impetus to create a generic NVME .kext driver so it's going to always be a serious issue when an OS update or upgrade comes up. AHCI works just fine, just as fast really. I just dodn't know about the difference until I mistakenly bought one off ebay.

I can still sell it for more than I paid for it so I should cut my losses time wise and toss it back on ebay.