High Sierra, Internet Recovery, and Time Machine [SOLVED]

Whew! Though I’ve made it many years without a catastrophic computer problem, the odds finally caught up with me this week. A recent upgrade to High Sierra seems to be at fault, leaving my computer unable to boot into OSX or even recognize the recovery partition. Restarting the computer while holding Command-Option-R let me run Disk First Aid and verify that the HD was still intact, but even a new install of High Sierra still did no good. No worries: Time Machine to the rescue, right?

Eventually, yes, but with a few caveats. My Time Machine backup is installed on a QNAP NAS box, connected via Ethernet. This disk did not pop up automatically when searching for available backups, so I had to enter its IP address manually. It took me a bit to figure out that:

  1. The IP had to be preceded by afp://
  2. The file path could not contain any spaces

Whuh? I was amazed that Time Machine wasn’t smart enough to parse spaces (or understand % substitutions), so I guess I’m back to best behavior when it comes to file_and_folder_naming. The more you know!