I recently restored a corrupted drive. I can no longer access my time-machine backups from my backup drive dated prior to the restoration. Files are still in backup folder. I need to restore my email files. Where are they located and can I restore just the email folder?
Mac Pro (Early 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Where are emails stored on Mac?
Open Time Machine and restore ~/Library/Mail
Allan
Thanks Allan for your reply. Problem is I can't access the files in my backup folder that are dated earlier than the date I restored my drive. The files are in my backup folder, but for some reason time-machine will only access the backup files I have created from the restored drive.
Maybe you need to provide more details on how you restored the corrupted drive.
Allan
Alan,
Thanks for your assistance. I have a OWC Accelsior PCIe SSD drive installed as my boot drive. I received a driver update which I installed. That corrupted the file system on the SSD drive and I was no longer able to boot from that drive. I contacted OWC tech support and they gave me instructions on restoring the drive, using Appple restore, which did not work because I could not get to the appropriate backup drive (a remote OWC Mercurt Elite AL Pro Qx2 NAS Box). So I reformatted the SSD and reinstalled Mountain Lion OSX and then proceeded to re-install my programs. Took about 10 hours, but everything is working fine again, except I do not have copies of my emails from the date I originally installed the SSD to when it crashed. I do however appear to have the backup files on the NAS, but when I run Time-machine, it only lists the files I have backed up since re-creating the SSD. There must be a way to access the files so I can retrieve my emails.
Thanks Again,
Burt
Link, thanks for the reply. I can now see my old backups in Time Machine. Now that I can see them, I cannot get to the mail folder which I understand is in /Library/mail/v2 folder. It is a hidden folder. How do I make the folder visible so I can restore it?
Many thanks for your help!
Burt
Triple-click the line below to select it, then copy (command-C) the text to the Clipboard:
~/Library/Mail
In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder
from the menu bar, paste (command-V) into the box that opens, and press return. A window may open with an item selected. If it does, enter Time Machine and restore the selected item. Your Mail database will be completely replaced by the backup.
I just realized the above answer won't work in your situation. What you need to do instead is enter Time Machine and press the key combination shift-command-G. That opens a text box into which you can enter the full path to an item you want to restore. In your case, that will be something like the following:
/Volumes/Volume Name/Users/you/Library/Mail
where "Volume Name" is the name of the disk from which you want to restore data, and "you" is your short user name.
I have the same problem. The file I want from my time machine backup is ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Google Earth/myplaces.kml.
NOTE: I start by first locating the new null .kml file then go to time machine. Have to use the GO menu with option key down then click on Library.
First problem: Can't get to the backup prior to restore UNLESS I change to user folder or hard drive BUT THEN 2nd problem: Library subfolder is hidden and can't get to it.
Something to do with system hiding the Library folder, I think.
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION??? ANYBODY. Solving this would help in restoring pre-restore data bases for lots of other applications I have to reinstall.
This mess all started because "mail" would not work with Yosemite. Had to install a clean new system thereby losing all MY non apple applications.
Being this is a reply to a 2012 message I don't expect much from this reply.
Chuck
I discovered the problem. My login name on previous pre-Yosemite system is different from my current Yosemite system. Therefor I didn't have permissions to access the backup file I wanted.
Solved the problem by using "terminal" app. I could get at the file by using Unix commands. I know this doesn't help non Unix people. If I had the same login name on both new and old system would that have solved the problem, can't say for sure.
Chuck
Time Machine file restore
