I setup TimeMachine as a Shares on my Server for my Mac Desktop and Laptop. using SMB not AFP

I recently had a system issue where my Desktop lost its drive *click*click*click* and I did a Restore via Internet which reinstalled Mountain Lion, which we all know is seriously Old. lol

 

I was able to find a Copy of Maverick from My laptop, but can't find anything newer. Not trying to Pirate or anything, but it just seems like Apple doesn't keep older copies of its OS online so we can leap frog up the releases to get our older machines backup to the newest release, which is really annoying. Of course the net hasn't been kind and I can't get my machine back to Sierra or High Sierra. I looked in the App Store and it told me I wasn't compatible with my Currently installed OS so I'm trying to find a Happy Medium to get back to where I was. 

 

Any advice from the Fellow Mac users here? I'm not a serious Mac user, but I do enjoy my two machines and I must say its been a crash course in figuring out how to get things going again seeing all my photos are sitting in a TimeMachine Backup with a newer OS/Libary that I can't reload. Lol 

 

I do have my Laptop so I could enable Full Resolution and move my Photo Library to a portable, but I really did like the newer versions of the MacOS on my 27-inch machine. 

 

I'm thinking of using a Portable drive and copy my TimeMachine backup from unRAID to it and hopefully I can restore to it, but I'm not 100% sure it'll work since I've never tried it. 

What version were you running before the drive failed?

Honestly I use my Laptop way more than my Desktop, but I think I had either Sierra or High Sierra installed. Not 100% sure. 

 

I know my Laptop is running Mojave. 

You might try this.

https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac-software/impossible-download-old-macos-3684588/

 

Ive actually got a copy of the High Sierra installer but no way to send it to you that i can see. Its about 5 GB.

Nice!!!!! Clicked on a link and it brought me to Sierra. Thanks @wgstarks Don't know why for the life of me I couldn't just type in Sierra in and find it in the App Store. Talk about Dumb. Lol

Apple doesn’t make previous versions available to everyone. You might want to keep the installer app after you install the os. I also like to maintain a clone of the startup drive just in case it fails. Carbon Copy Cloner is very handy for this. Not free though.

Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to do exactly what you suggested. I took out the 1TB Spinner and put in a SSD and WOW what a world of difference in this iMac. 

 

One thing that rather annoyed me, but it is what it is now. I reconnected my TimeMachine to unRAID and wham erased all of my 476GB Backup. Lol

So now I'm re-downloading 26k worth of Pictures and Videos off the Cloud. *sigh*

Something told me I should of copied over my Photo Library first then connected to it, but live and learn. 😱

 

At least now I have a Totally clean machine and none of the Bloat that I've accumulated over the years. 

You can just get a cheap external spinner for the cloned drive.