How do I retrieve Time Machine folder from Trash

Hello All,

This is my first posting!

I've read quite a bit on these forums, and found some great info on Time Machine, particularly Pondini's posts and website (thank you!).

Here is my issue:

iMac (2007) with Mountain Lion getting slow, and last week start-up got stuck on grey screen. Looks like hard drive failing, according to Apple Store Genius. They manage to get me back up and running in Mountain Lion thanks to a recent Time Machine backup on external hard drive via USB.

I get the beast home, and start a new TM backup on the same external HD. It says disk full, can't complete backup.

In Finder (bad idea, I now know), I open the TM folder in the external HD, only to find duplicate copies of the Macintosh folder, with months worth of backups in each (identical). Thinking this will confuse the Mac/Time Machine, I figure I should delete one. I call the Apple store to make sure it's ok to delete one copy. They say YES. I drag it to the trash, but when I go back to check the backups.backupdb folder, they're BOTH gone.

I try to drag it back out of the trash, but after a few hours of "preparing to copy" the iMac freezes. Back to the Apple store, and it's now limping along in OS version 10.6. A new iMac purchase is close on the horizon...

So, I have a recent TM backup that I would like to use, but it's in the trash on my external HD!

I've used Finder to look through the folder in the trash, and retrieved individual documents and desktop folders that I need.

Email, calendar and contacts are all safely duplicated on my MBP.

However, I have music and a few years of photos that I desperately would like to recover.

Ultimately, I plan to use the most recent TM backup to migrate to my upcoming new iMac.

All is not totally lost, as I have a second TM backup on another external HD - although it's from March 2013. Not the end of the world to lose photos from March to now, but if I can get them back, I'd like to. They seem so tantalizingly close, sitting in the trash.

So, my question is: can I retrieve my Time Machine Macintosh folder from the trash?

Options I've considered so far:

• Simply use the "Put Back" option that comes up with Right-Clicking the folder. Too chicken to try this up to now.
• Drag and drop it? Huge file, will take a looooong time.
• Copy one recent backup in the trash to a separate drive and use that to migrate to new iMac (from Pondini's FAQ#18, I'm doubting this will work - but I'm trying this now; several hours in and file is 317Gb).
• Copy the photos from an individual backup. From what I gather, with my version of iPhoto being '11, I can't see individual photos and I'll have to copy the entire library as one file and import it later. Again, huge file, long time.

I would appreciate any suggestions!

Many thanks in advance.