stan 9155 wrote:
Thanks,
The answer (#19) states that only the last successful backup is used. That will suffice for most of the items but there are some files that are on an older backup that were deleted from the imac to save space (movies etc.)
Eeeek! That's dangerous -- not only does that mean you only have one copy, but Time Machine will, sooner or later,
delete its copies of things that are no longer on your system. Do you know those files are still there? If so, do
not do a new backup until you recover them -- the first backup of the new Mac will be a full one, so Time Machine may have to delete a lot of old backups to make room.
After the new imac is set up and has the files from the "latest backup) can I locate some older specific files on the time machine and reinstall them on the new imac
Probably. If you migrated a user account, and the files you want were saved from that user account, then you should be able to log on with that account and selectively restore from those old backups via the +*Browse ...+* option and the "Star Wars" display. See #17 and #15 in
Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.
But if you're not logged on with the same account that the files "belong" to, OSX thinks you're a different user, and probably won't let you access the "other" user's data, even if you're an Admin user. (This does depend on what permissions were on those old files when they were backed-up.)
