I'm currently attempting a Time Machine restore and getting a little frustrated.

First of all, there's some uncharacteristically bad design on the Migration Assistant. If I select the source of the backup and there's only one backup on that source, it apparently automatically starts using that backup...I think? I can't tell! Because I never told it to do anything, and there's no progress meter or any information at all. It just sits there saying "loading backup" and nothing at all happens.

And that leads me to the actual problem. I wouldn't mind that stuff as much if I thought it was actually doing anything, but it sure doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. It's been sitting there for a few hours and nothing has changed. It still says "loading backup."

The Time Machine backup was done on my Synology. I had no problems setting it up and the backup came off without a hitch. But the restore seems to be another thing. I called Apple support and they say this is normal, but what concerns me is that according to my Synology DSM there's next to no data going in or out of the NAS. I'm currently seeing about 1KBps upstream bandwidth.

So what's the deal? What do I do? Should I just leave it for a day and see what happens? I have to get this Macbook back to my client. The backup took like 5 hours over WiFi, but at least I knew it was active. Now I have it wired to gigabit ethernet and I have no idea what's going on.

Help?

Welp, solved it already. Had to dig about 10 discussions deep in the Apple forum Google results, but someone else had the same exact scenario.

Turns out that when they did the reset, the image they put back on the laptop was the original Sierra, and the backup was Mojave. It looks like Migration Assistant doesn't like that the backup was for a later version of MacOS, so it just sat there doing nothing.

Instead, I booted into recovery and the restore began immediately. Others who weren't able to do it that way just set up the MacBook, updated to Mojave, then restored.