Hi, recently I accidentally deleted a folder in Mail software and seemingly lost all the contents as well as the folder itself. Can I retrieve a single Mail folder from Time Machine, and if so, please can anyone tell me how?
Thank you.
OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library/Mail/V2. Enter Time Machine and restore the deleted folder.
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library/Mail/V2. Enter Time Machine and restore the deleted folder.
Hi Eric, how are you?
Thanks for your help. I got as far into your instructions as selecting Library > Mail > V2, and then “Enter Time Machine”. I identified the Mail folder to be restored, but don’t know how to restore it. I clicked on it, and it opened, showing two items: (1) A folder with a very long name of seemingly random letters and numbers, (2) a file named “info,plist”.
Can you please advise me from there?
As an aside, I have two other questions. I’m curious as to why in the Time Machine date scrolling thing on the right of the screen, there are multiple items for “Today”, even though the last time I did any back-ups was last night soon before midnight. Why would that be?
Secondly, related to folders seemingly named with a series of very long letters and numbers, I use Nikon “ViewNX 2” software and I have often noticed that an unknown folder is always shown (see attachment), which I cannot see in Finder. The folder’s name seems to change over time. Any ideas what it is?
Thank you very much – and sorry for so many questions.
Cheers!
You are welcome. Are you able to enter Time Machine using the Time Machine application (just checking)? Is there a Restore button that appears after selecting the folder?
While in Time Machine, to see all mounted volumes shift - command - c. Information learned from Linc Davis.
The second item down in your screen shot appears to be a Time Machine hard drive.
McBrain and Eric,
Via an external drive, I use Time Machine (TM) on my iMac but thus far have fortunately never needed to use it in earnest. I've played around with it a little, though, and myself have wondered from time to time how it'd be possible to restore just a single file or group of files.
Okay, so let's take a general case. You open Finder, start TM and then pick (if it's amongst the dateline at far right) the date/time from which you want to restore. Then on the big bar at screen bottom you click Restore. This presumably then gives you the state of the machine that you require. But then what do you do if and when you've found from it the file/folder you're after? You presumably wouldn't want to then stay in the historic state you're in; you'd want to go back again to the state the machine was in just before you did the restore. But clearly doing that would simply undo the file retrieval just performed.
So, is the only way of dealing with this to take the retrieved file/folder and temporarily copy it to a non-TM drive of some sort, eg. a USB memory stick, and then, once back in 'today's' state, copy the file off the non-TM drive to wherever you want it to be on the machine?
Something else I've puzzled over is whether TM only ever restores the slice of the hard drive's contents that you select and see in the selected front TM window, or whether instead TM restores the entire contents of the hard drive (or the whole of the OSX partition, if the hard drive's been partitioned). In other words, does TM give you each time a backup of the the whole of the OSX partition? My gut feeling is that it has to be the latter, as the user will in theory need to restore anything from a single file to a complete state, from within the OSX partition. I've never found any publication on TM that's ever explained this.
Based on my past experience with Time Machine, once I hit restore, the application quits, returns me to Finder, and then displays a box that shows it is restoring the file. It only restores what I have selected. Time Machine is capable of restoring the entire computer set up, but you have to be booted into the Recovery Partition to do that.
Suppose it's an app or utility that you want to get rid of from your machine, rather than something that you want to restore. Can you also use TM for that? That's to say, in my asking whether TM could restore a whole partition to a previous state I was also wondering whether you could simply fold back the entire partition to a previous time when you didn't have the unwanted app or utility and so get rid of the app or utility (and its extraneous Library, etc files) by that. If that can work, then it'd be an ideal means to cleanly restore your OSX partition following, say, a viral infection or some other disaster where unknown files got sprayed all over the partition.
TM could restore a whole partition to a previous state
Time Machine can do that if booted into the Recovery Partition. Your last sentence is a good example of when to use it. One thing to note is that you will not have all the files created since the date of the backup you restored. Once restored, you can reboot, enter Time Machine and restore those files if you want.
Thank you very much, Eric! Problem solved!
To summarise (for the benefit of others with this problem), I did the following:
🙂
You are welcome.
Mail software - recovering a single Mail folder from Time Machine?
