Time Machine

Question

Level 1

4 points

Time Machine

You mention backing up a machine you want to get rid of to Time Machine. Have you tried to use such a backup? In my experience you cannot access individual files and folders backed up from a machine you no longer have. You can only do a full restore. This really, really limites Time Machine's value. You can't archive a couple of backups and retrieve files from them. The only way is to dedicate a drive and do a full restore, extremely time consuming and unhelpful. Am I missing something?

Time Machine-OTHER, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Dec 10, 2013 8:51 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 10, 2013 9:03 AM in response to jbrizzle

You can access the backed up files themselves from the back up file itself in the finder, you don't need Time Machine enabled to do this.

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Answer 2

jbrizzle Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 10, 2013 9:14 AM in response to Winston Churchill

Good show Winston, many thanks. Much better than nothing; and it is still a pitiful offering from Apple, as each incremental backup is in its own folder, so endless fishing is required to put a foldder together to restore. It is completely impractical to restore more than an occasional file this way.

I understand why it is organized that way, they just need to let time machine access it and present you the information as it usually does.

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Answer 3

Dec 10, 2013 9:35 AM in response to jbrizzle

No back up facility will restore an incremental back up without the original back up software being available.

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Answer 4

jbrizzle Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 10, 2013 11:05 AM in response to Winston Churchill

Yes, but this is a little different. When you have TM available, you can't get it to retrieve files from a backup you made from another machine. Say, a machine you used to have. You can only do a full restore of everything. So as an archive*, a TM backup is useless. TM has that lovely flip through interface, but only if your are flipping through a backup of the machine you are currently running on. Otherwise, nothing. Try it, see if you find differently. I'd love to hear they fixed this.

* I do understand the issues with confusing backups with archives. This might be a case where you had multiple backups and chose to use one as an accessible archive and freeze the others as backups of that one.

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Answer 5

Oct 26, 2014 9:38 PM in response to jbrizzle

Time machine saves everything from a computer. If you are getting rid of a computer, and are not planning on doing a full restore to another, I wouldn't use time machine. At that point, I would save the files I wanted on a regular storage device. If you aren't doing a full restore, it is pointless to back up all the system files and such.

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Answer 6

Dec 17, 2014 6:32 AM in response to DBTechnology_1

This thread is very important to me. I currently use Time Machine and a Time Capsule to perform backups. I am about to get a new Mac. I thought it would be a seamless "swap-one-for-the-other" and march on. I would like to have have old files available (i.e., from an archives) on my new machine without having to restore in entirety. If I am following, I should actually copy any file that I believe I will need or use onto a flash drive (or similar) and then start over with the new machine.

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