Restoring User Library folder from Time Machine

Have you actually opened Library and then entered Time Machine?

Open the Library folder, then enter Time Machine.

Do you have snapshots of anything? What about your Documents folder, for example?

Check your exclusion list in the TM preference pane. Did you exclude the home Library folder from backup?

Click the Options... button in the preference pane to see the exclusion list.

DWNCC wrote:

In other words I am unable to access my backed up files: Address Book, iCal, Mail, Keychains etc.

Let's back up a bit.

Why do you need to do this? Have you lost something? Why do you only want to restore this specific data. If you need to restore your entire home directory, you can do that with Migration Assistant. If you only need to restore some specific items, most of those items listed above have their own Time Machine interface.

One option here is to show all hidden files in the Finder, and then navigate through the Time Machine backup instances to see if there are any instances of the Library folder in those backups. To do this, open the Terminal and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true

After doing this type "killall Finder" to restart the Finder (or use the OS X force-quit window by pressing Option-Command-Escape), and you should see hidden files. Then open the Time Machine disk and navigate through the backups to the various instances of your user home folder and see if the "Library" folder is listed there.

To undo this, just repeat the above command with "false" at the end of it instead of "true."

DWNCC wrote:

It's a long story. My Mac Apps were crashing frequently as I have an older version MacBook Pro, using it with 10.7.3. It just didn't like it one bit.

Unfortunately, there are many people here in Apple Support Communities who claim there is something fundamentally wrong with Lion and are advising everyone to go back to older versions of the operating system. That is very bad advice. If Lion is misbehaving, there is some problem that needs to be corrected.

It is not a good idea to try to restore your user account piecemeal like this.

If you have erased everything, then at least you don't have to worry about damaging anything. Try this:

1) Run System Preferences > Users & Groups and click the "+" button to create a new account. Change account type from "Standard" to "Administrator". Give it a short name like "admin".

2) Log out of your current user and Log in to the new admin user.

3) Delete any old users you had.

4) Run Migration Assistant and migrate your old users from Time Machine

I have Notes in my Mail [in Reminders/Notes area] and for some reason about 15 of them are missing = I went back to a month or two ago and with Mail open, did a Time Machine search and found the 25 or whatever notes == I restored them and they came in under Time Machine heading, on mymac, in Notes -- but they are empty folders....I did the show hidden files terminal thing and see the files but now I can't figure out where the Notes files are in Mail -- I found Notes.mbox and restored it but there was nothing in there either.

Any sugg. on how to restore the Notes [reminders] part of Mail???