How to access Time Machine backup

Question

Created Aug ’15

Replies 2

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Hi all,

Some background. Last week I had some trouble with my iCloud account when restoring my iPad Air. After some time I decided to change my iCloud account password after which restoring my iPad succeeded. However, since I changed my password for my iCloud account I had to re-enter it in my iCloud settings on my iMac (early 2009) running El Capitan beta 4. It didn't work. Every time I tried I got an error back saying 'verification failed - an unknown error occurred'. An hour telephone support with Apple didn't solve the problem so one course remained: downgrading to Yosemite.

I downgraded by re-installing Snow Leopard and from there upgrading to Yosemite. I didn't have a Yosemite startup disk (USB or anything) so I had to do it this way. Anyway, I'm back on Yosemite, got my iCloud account working again but... this also erased my HD. I do have a Time Machine backup on an external harddrive with a complete backup... for El Capitan so it wouldn't let me migrate it to Yosemite. I tried restoring it on a partition with El Capitan installed but it failed due to 'errors copying certain files'.

Is there a way to access the files within the Time Machine backup? I don't much mind the settings and all but it would be nice to retrieve some of the data in the backup. Any help would be much appreciated!

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Answer 1

yingfuli OP

Aug ’15

Sorry, after a restart I suddenly had access to backups.backupdb and from there I could copy the files I wanted.

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Answer 2

Habil OP

Aug ’15

Hi yingfuli,

I know your problem have solved, but i want to help the next people who dont know,

Here it is:

1.You can access your Time Machine backup files directly through the Finder:

2.Click on the Finder icon on the far left of your dock

3.And in the Finder window, you’ll see your drive in the left column under Devices. It will have whatever name you gave it, and an icon representative of your hard drive brand. In this example, the Time Machine backup hard drive is a Lacie, and it is named Backup.

4.The Backups.backupdb folder contains all the backups on your Time Machine external hard drive organized by chronological files:

5.Select the folder with the date you want to enter, and you’ll find all your files within that folder. Just follow the paths until you get to the files you’re looking for. Or, simply search for it in the Finder’s search window if you remember the file name.

6.When you’ve found the file, simply drag it to the desktop or file on your hard drive to copy it back to the present (or is that back to the future?). You’ll notice the green circle with white plus sign indicating it’s not transferring it from your Time Machine backup, but copying it, so it will always be on your backup.

Good luck everyone,

Habil.

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