How to access a back up on Time Machine without a broken hard drive?

docweif wrote:

thank you..

The key thing really, is - Within TM, how can you access data from a drive that's no longer plugged in.

Having completed my testing, you don't have to have the drive connected. However, not every backup may have anything from that drive backed up. If it doesn't, then the drive does not show up. You almost have to go hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month to find a backup that has the external drive on the backup. If you have a roundabout idea, it might not be too difficult to zero in on a particular backup.

I would imagine a daily or weekly would almost always have something backed up. However, if you weren't changing anything, maybe you have to go back quite a ways to find a backup of that drive.

In Finder, try Go > Computer. Then, Enter Time Machine. Go back in Time and see if the drive appears at some point.

Another guess would be to connect a new drive with same name and Enter Time Machine from there.

I have only tried to restore an external once, but the drive was still working. I decided it was too cumbersome to use Time Machine that way and started using Carbon Copy Cloner for my external drives.

You said you backed up the now-failed drive to Time Machine and it should be in Time Machine.

After you enter Time Machine the sidebar should list yot now-failed external drive. If you click on it you should see the data on the now-failed drive. If nothing there that would indicate that drive was never backed up.

You're right. If the drive isn't there it won't show up in the sidebar in Time Machine. That seems to have changed somewhere along the line.

Try connecting an external drive with the exact same name and then try Time Machine.

When you enter Time Machine you are looking at what is on Time Machine. If after entering Time Machine you can't find the external data disk that mean it was not being backed up.

Try using Finder to look at your Time Machine disk to see if you can find the now-failed external drive.

I used to have two startup volumes on my laptop when I switched over to Monterey (the old Big Sur startup). Because it was Big Sur, it had a Data volume that got backed up by my Monterey startup. I have since deleted that volume.

When I go back in time and use Go to Computer (cmd-shift-C) I see the old data volume in my backups.

There should not be any difference between that volume and a volume mounted from an external drive.

I'm going to do some more testing with a few external drives and see what I can figure out.

I understand a bit how that feels as I lost data on OneDrive a few months ago.

Here are a few things to consider/try:

1) Give Apple Support a call to discuss and confirm you understanding of Time Machine. You'll probably want to ask for a senior advisor specializing in Time Machine issues.

2) Perhaps the failed disk is not a complete write-off. There are data recovery companies that specialize in recovering data. However, the price tag may be steep.

3) When automatic Time Machine backups are enable, I believe that the local snapshots of the system volume don't exclude data (even if excluded in Time Machine options). These snapshots disappear fairly quickly but can be mounted using the Disk Utility. Perhaps you could retrieve some data in this way.

What does Disk Utility show about the drive?

Make sure View All is selected under View.

Posting a screen show would be useful.

Enter the Time Machine app and go back in time until the broken drive is available. Then you can recover the files on it.

I am confused.

You say you have external drive ( #1) that has your data and photos.

You also say you are using a separate external drive (#2) for Time Machine and you are backing up/Time Machine disk #1.

So why does failure of #1 prevent you from access the Time Machine backup on #2?

Is the user attempting to perform two Time Machine backups to two different External Drives.

AFAIK - this might be possible but not suggested.

Add - Time Machine what's 100% control the the chosen Drive and makes the Drive Read Only in the process.

docweif wrote:

Hi thanks.

No, just the dedicated TM drive is used for TM, Nothing else and the other drive (The broken one), is only used for data and photo library.

Use wrote " Drive#1 is the broken drive, (With all the photos and data on it), but it is backed up on drive #2, (the dedicated TM drive)"

" My problem is, when I go into TM I can't see Drive #1 anymore, because it's no longer mounted. So it no longer appears on the left hand side), so I can't access the backup or any date, even though I know the backup is in there, somewhere."

Since the problematic Drive is not used for Time Machine Backup - why is one using Time Machine to look for Backups that are not there.

One says there is a Dedicated TM Backup Drive that is Not the Problematic Drive

I am just not getting it