In trying to open up storage capacity on MacBook Air, I deleted an entire folder of important work documents. When I enter Time Machine to try to restore, I no longer see that folder on my back-ups even though I completed a back-up a few days ago (before deleting folder tonight). Can someone please help me? Thank you.
MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.11
It won't show up in the left column. What you need to do is select one level above where the deleted folder was located and then roll back in time.
Example if you deleted the folder and it was inside the Documents folder, select the documents folder and then roll back in time until the deleted folder appears.
It won't show up in the left column. What you need to do is select one level above where the deleted folder was located and then roll back in time.
Example if you deleted the folder and it was inside the Documents folder, select the documents folder and then roll back in time until the deleted folder appears.
Did you follow the steps in this article, to find your document folder by selecting the correct backup from the timeline?
Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support
Did you check your user folder?
The folders that I created and moved to "Favorites" on the left side of the Finder, are originally located in the user folder.
For example my "Documents" folder is shown in the left column under "Favorites" and can be found under the name of my user account.
I can't remove a folder from that left column, unless I delete it in my user folder.
So the folder you are looking for in the Favorite section might still part of the user folder.
Just to make sure, are you seeing this kind of picture, when you scroll through your backups?
copied from the homepage of a well respected member of the Apple Discussions, a great knowledge base about how TimeMachine works: TimeMachine - FAQ's
Thanks for replying so quickly. I have tried going back to my last back-up which was 1/12/22 but the entire folder and all contents are still missing. I deleted the folder while in Manage Storage because it was named "Manual" which was not the correct name of folder so I thought the entire folder had somehow duplicated and wanted to eliminate duplication but ended up deleting the actual folder with 3 months of work. Any other ideas? Thanks again.
This is what I see - I can’t go further back than 1/12/22 though that is the backup I want - I don’t have buttons at bottom of screen - the folder I want used to be in that left column under Favorites but it’s gone from the 1/12 backup even though I deleted it on 1/18
Any chance that your data is included in one of the older backups listed in the Timeline?
It seems to me it should be but it's all vanished. I don't understand as I thought that was the purpose of being able to restore an older version of a back up.
Restore deleted folder and all contents from Time Machine
