I have a time machine backup on an external hard drive and my Mac is dead.. not sure if I’m going to go back with a Mac or not.. my question is, can I get some of the information off the backup without a Mac? I have a lot of photos that I don’t want to lose. Any suggestions would be appreciated
thank you
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
There is no PC version of Time Machine. Doing a full recovery of your data requires using the Time Machine application, and that requires a Mac. It is possible to see the files in the backup in the Finder but Time Machine creates incremental updates using hard symlinks. These are nearly indistinguishable from real files. However, your original backup is stored in a sparsebundle image on the backup disk. But a PC cannot read a Mac formatted disk nor mount the sparsebundle. So, you will need a Mac to recover your backup. If you have a friend with a Mac, then perhaps that person will let you use their Mac long enough to recover your files. You can also try your local Apple shop. They may help you recover the data.
If you don't know that you will get a new Mac, then be sure to put your files on a disk formatted with MSDOS using an MBR partition scheme.
There is no PC version of Time Machine. Doing a full recovery of your data requires using the Time Machine application, and that requires a Mac. It is possible to see the files in the backup in the Finder but Time Machine creates incremental updates using hard symlinks. These are nearly indistinguishable from real files. However, your original backup is stored in a sparsebundle image on the backup disk. But a PC cannot read a Mac formatted disk nor mount the sparsebundle. So, you will need a Mac to recover your backup. If you have a friend with a Mac, then perhaps that person will let you use their Mac long enough to recover your files. You can also try your local Apple shop. They may help you recover the data.
If you don't know that you will get a new Mac, then be sure to put your files on a disk formatted with MSDOS using an MBR partition scheme.
That may be a question to ask in a PC forum.
restore a backup to a pc from time Machine
