If I have backed up my Apple laptop (a MacBook Air/ 11 inch early 2014/OS 10.13.6 ) to an external hard drive, would I be able to use the back-ups to load onto a PC or Chromebook? If so, how might I do this? Thank you for your help.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air 11″, 10.13
Depends on how you made the backup.
Macs normally use the APFS and HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) filesystems. Neither Windows nor ChromeBooks have support for these filesystems built in.
You can purchase software for Windows that will let it access Mac-formatted drives.
Other World Computing - MacDrive Standard & Pro
I don't think anyone makes such software for ChromeBooks.
Another issue would be whether you made the backups using Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, or Time Machine. The first two make clone backups (although they may also have features to save old versions of files), so you could just browse the filesystem if your Windows PC had something like MacDrive installed on it.
Time Machine makes backups of files at multiple points in time, and a Time Machine disk is a bit like the inside of an automatic transmission. It's not meant for you to open and go poking around inside. It's meant for Time Machine to use, when you go poking around using the Time Machine user interface – which only runs on Macs.
Note that Windows PCs and ChromeBooks do not run macOS or Mac applications, so while you might be able to get data out of a backup, you wouldn't be able to attach the backup disk to a Windows PC or ChromeBook, boot from it, and use your Windows PC or ChromeBook as If it were a Mac.
How can I use MacBook backups to load on a PC or Chromebook?
