First, what this article is not. This is not Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant copies a running Mac onto a new Mac — the old machine has to be alive and plugged in. macup restores from a backup, which means the old Mac does not need to exist at all. Stolen, drowned, on fire, sold last year — doesn’t matter. Your data is already offsite. This article gets it back.
Step 1 — Finish Apple setup
Unbox the new Mac. Walk through Apple Setup Assistant until you land on the desktop — language, region, Apple ID, Touch ID, Siri, screen time. When Setup Assistant offers Migration Assistant, skip it. You are doing a backup restore, not a Mac-to-Mac copy.
If you have no Apple ID on the new Mac, that is fine. macup does not require one.
Step 2 — Install macup
Open Safari, go to macup.app/download, and click Download macup for Mac. Drag the app to Applications and launch it. Grant Full Disk Access when prompted.
For the full install walkthrough, see “Install macup and run your first backup.”
Step 3 — Sign in to your macup account
On the welcome screen, choose Sign in. Enter the email address you used on the old Mac. macup registers this new Mac as a new device entry under your existing account.
The old Mac still shows up in your account dashboard even after it is gone. That is intentional — the backups are still there, tied to that device record, and that is exactly how you get them back.
Step 4 — Reassign a license or use a second seat
If your plan covers a single device, you will need to reassign the license from the old Mac to this one. If your plan has multiple seats, you can just activate the new Mac on an open seat and leave the old device record alone.
See “Reassign a license” for the exact steps.
Step 5 — Enter your passphrase
macup asks for the passphrase you set on the old Mac. This passphrase derives the key that decrypts your backups. We do not have it. We cannot reset it. We cannot retrieve it.
If you have your passphrase
Type it in. Continue.
If you have forgotten your passphrase
Use your recovery code instead. Click Use recovery code on the sign-in screen, paste or type the code, and set a new passphrase. This is why we made you save the recovery code when you first set up macup — exactly for this moment. See “Recover your account with your recovery code” for the details.
Step 6 — Choose backup sets to restore
macup shows every backup set that was running on the old Mac. You do not have to restore all of them.
Common picks:
- Home folder only — the most common choice. Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Downloads, app support data.
- Home folder plus Applications data — restores app settings and saved state (not the apps themselves; reinstall those from the Mac App Store or the vendor).
- Everything except the old external-drive archive — if you had a backup set pointed at an external drive that is still physically intact, you do not need to pull that 2 TB archive across the internet. Leave it for a direct restore when the drive is next plugged in.
Step 7 — Pick a snapshot
Default is the latest. That is usually what you want.
Pick an earlier snapshot if you know the old Mac had corruption, a ransomware attempt, or a bad software install that you do not want to carry forward. Every snapshot is independently selectable in the timeline.
Step 8 — Pick the target path
Default: original paths. Files land exactly where they lived on the old Mac.
Username remapping
If the new Mac’s short username is different from the old one, macup offers a remap. For example: /Users/lee/Documents on the old Mac becomes /Users/leev/Documents on the new Mac. Confirm the remap, or adjust it, before continuing.
Step 9 — Restore
Click Restore. The work runs in the background — you can use the Mac while it happens. Browse, email, set up other apps. macup restores in dependency-safe order so that critical folders land first.
Rough sizing: a first-time restore of 500 GB from macup Cloud on gigabit fibre typically runs 80 to 100 minutes. External-drive and NAS restores are bounded by the destination’s read speed.
When the restore finishes, macup resumes continuous snapshots automatically on the new Mac. Your backup from here forward is live.
After the restore
Open a few folders. Check a few files. Does this match your memory of the old Mac? If something is missing or wrong, do not re-restore on top — go back to the Restore view and pick an earlier snapshot for just the affected folder. Every snapshot is still there. You have not lost anything.