How do I recover old emails on Time Machine after Big Sur upgrade?

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Level 1

9 points

How do I recover old emails on Time Machine after Big Sur upgrade?

I have diligently used Time Machine for many years without issue. Following many months on Big Sur I need to recover some old emails that have now become important. These emails are 1 year old and were sent using Mac OS10.14. TM has the backups from this time; I can see this when I open the TM backup file structure. However when I enter TM it will only open the backups made since the Big Sur upgrade. The emails are important enough to warrant rebuilding my Mac on 10.14 to gain access, but I understand that now I have upgraded my TM backups with Big Sur they cannot now be used on 10.14. Can anyone advise how to gain access to these old emails? Thanks in advance

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Oct 16, 2021 9:44 PM

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Answer 1

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kwmacs Author

Level 1

9 points

Oct 17, 2021 9:46 PM in response to judysings

Hi judysings

Thank you for taking the time to issue support.

Because of my urgent need for the old email I called Apple support, and after a number of simple but failed steps I ended up with remote support logging on to my MacBook Pro and taking a look at my problem. They confirmed that entering time machine would only allow selection of dates from Big Sur backups, and that earlier dated backups performed by OS10.14 could not be read. The right hand list of dates and bars would go red for the accessible backups, but only go pink for the older backups. These backups were available but simply not readable by Big Sur. Support surmised that when Big Sur did its first backup on top of the already established back ups it was simply added; all previous backups were ignored and not updated to suit Big Sur.

Apple support showed me how I could open up these backups, "manually" pull out the emails then import them into Mail, which I did. Took some effort and time to import and sort out the email history but eventually I obtained my important missing email. All good!

This was my first use of Apple support after 25 years of Apple Mac ownership, and the support specialist told me that others had the same problem. I guess it is a software issue of some kind that either needs to be taken care of by Apple, or users will doubt the reliability of Time Machine. I have found other posts here and on other forums which have recorded this issue. I was impressed by Apple support.

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Answer 2

judysings

Community Specialist

Oct 17, 2021 6:45 PM in response to kwmacs

Hello kwmacs,

We see that you need help to restore files with Time Machine.

If you use Time Machine to back up the files on your Mac, you can easily get back lost items or recover older versions of files. Check this out: Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac

Cheers!

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Answer 3

tbirdvet

Level 6

13,893 points

Oct 18, 2021 6:13 AM in response to kwmacs

You can no longer retrieve single emails from TM as before. This issue started with Catalina. This has been reported to Apple many times and they do not appear to want (or can) address the issue. You can get other apps that will do a better job of backing up your email and makes it easy to restore as required. You can still retrieve entire mailboxes but then you need to sort through all the emails to find a specific one which is very time consuming.

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Answer 4

tbirdvet

Level 6

13,893 points

Oct 18, 2021 6:14 AM in response to judysings

No longer works with mail as in the past.

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How do I recover old emails on Time Machine after Big Sur upgrade?

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