Locating .kmz files in Time Machine

Yes. I understand what your intent was. That’s not the question. If you want people to provide meaningful assistance, you are going to have to give us more details.

Did you do a completely system restore with Time Machine? If not, how did you do the restore?

Did you manually reinstall Google Earth?

What you are describing sounds like data internal to Google Earth. It looks like Google Earth stores these files in "~/Library/Application Support/Google Earth” where “~” is a shortcut to your home directory. You should be able to find that location in Time Machine. You may need to navigate to that folder in the Finder first.

Make sure Google Earth is NOT running. Go to your home directory. Hold down the option key and then choose “Library” from the Go menu in the Finder. Go into Application Support. Then, enter Time Machine. Locate the Google Earth folder in your backup and restore that folder.

Restore your Time Machine backup from prior to the upgrade onto a scratch storage device, and you will have what was then present, and you can search the restored environment.

Why not run the Time Machine application from your Applications folder, and from that interface, perform a Spotlight search:

name:.kmz OR name:.kml

DavieMichael wrote:

the main folder hidden away somewhere containing all the .kmz locations of my Favourite Places.

Where were these files “hidden away”? Not all files are backed up by Time Machine. Also, not all locations are searched in the “normal” search. You can search more locations if you do a Finder search and add the criteria “System files” and set it to “are included”.

If you gave us more context about this “heavy file”, we might be able to tell you more. Many apps like to provide private storage for their own data. This information may only be recoverable if you do a full restore or if you know exactly where it is in the appropriate hidden directory. Most files on the operating system are not included in a normal search. Otherwise, you would get thousands of hits for any search, making the whole thing useless.

If you know the name of your folder containing your .kmz locations, the following may locate that folder:

kind:folder AND name:foldername

In Catalina—If for some reason you stored those files/folder outside your home folder, then it is possible they got moved to "relocated"

From the Macintosh HD>Users>Shared>Relocated Items

Time Machine —your files should be where you left them prior to the Catalina upgrade, nothing changes there.

3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.

DavieMichael wrote:

I did not restore the Mojave Hard Disk with the TimeMachine.

OK. That would explain why you don’t have the data. You didn’t restore it.

So, to go back to the problem, I wish to access the .kmz files in either the Mojave or the Catalina TimeMachine backups. And nothing else (as I don't want to introduce any problems "leaking" from one OS version to another).

See my instructions above. Please MAKE SURE that you DO NOT CHANGE anything in your Time Machine backup. If you make any changes, you could corrupt your backup.

If you don’t use the easy restore that is built into Time Machine, then you are going to have to do it manually. See my instructions above.

A half-terabyte is a pretty small external hard disk storage device, these days. Eight terabytes and up starts to get a little more expensive, though. And a three or five terabyte external Disk device can then be re-purposed for use as a Time Machine target.

Restore, not copy.

Had this been used to revert, this should have restored the whole environment, too,.

I’m at a loss around why the KMZ files are even missing.

Unless there was an effort to manually select, or partially restore.

That’d certainly be a potential cause for missing files.