How To Recover Specific Items When MacBookPro Won't Boot So I have a mid 2012 MacBookPro running Mojave and it's fully upgraded (SSD and 16gb RAM). I accidentally ran system updates and that led to an error and now every time I try to boot it gets stuck on the white logo screen with no progress bar.
I have a 1TB external drive that has a Time Machine back up on it but the problem is I haven't backed it up in the last few months. I would really like to recover the files created in these past few months. What would be the easiest solution to recover them?
My process so far: I bought an additional 2tb external hard drive. I booted up in Internet Recovery Mode, unmounted the internal hard drive (SSD), and created a new disk image from Container disk2 (the container for the internal hard drive) to copy onto the 2tb external hard drive. I had to use this method because the regular option &quot;Copy From Macintosh HD&quot; was greyed out. That worked and I'm in the process of verifying it in Disk Utility to make sure there's no errors. I really want to ensure that the files that I want are going to be able to be opened though. So before I restore the old Time Machine backup (from the 1 tb drive) and open the .dmg file (from the 2 tb drive) I'm thinking I should reinstall the OS in Disk Utility onto the 2tb external hard drive. Then I boot up off that and check to see if the Disk2.dmg correctly copied and I can retrieve my files.
Does that seem like it would work? Open to other suggestions as well. Thank you!
I would recommend a different approach to avoid unforseen problems and make it more predictable:
Install macOS on the external disk and boot from it. Mount the internal disk and copy files over manually to a 3rd location - either a separate APFS volume on the external disk or a 3rd external disk. Once you've copied and verified all files, wipe and restore the backup on the internal disk.