Accessing Time Machine from a new MacBook Air

I recently bought a new MacBook Air. I was able to successfully restore the old machine to the new one using Migration Assitant and my time machine backup. Now that the new comptuter is working fine and I have sent the old computer in for the trade in, I want to know if I can still look at the backups from my old computer's time machine backups. It appears that this is not possible, but I would like to see if there is a way to do so. Also it appears that I cannot use that same disc for backing up the new computer.

Will the only solution be to format the drive and start all over, losing all the data? (data which is not usable anyway?)

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Oct 27, 2024 6:07 AM

Top-ranking reply

neuroanatomist

Level 9

56,349 points

Posted on Oct 28, 2024 6:25 AM

You cannot use the Time Machine browser for the old backups on the new Mac*, but you can view the Time Machine backups by drilling down into the Backups.backupdb folder on that drive in Finder. There will be a folder in there for each backup date, with the full backups in there (so you'll have to drill deep to find the files you want, e.g. down into your User folder).

*If you set up the drive as the TM destination for your new Mac, it should prompt you to claim the old backups for the new machine, and if you do so then you can use the regular TM browser to go back in time. But you can also just wipe the drive and start fresh.

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support (see step 5)

View in context

Accessing Time Machine from a new MacBook Air

Similar questions