I was updating the details of one contact and too late i realised that i had deleted some of the note details that I wanted to retain. Is it possible to use a Time Machine backup just to restore the details for this one contact without overwriting the contact details for others?
iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), iPad Air 2, iPhone 7 +
Good question. Did you exclude anything from the Time Machine backup? Read Exclude files from a Time Machine backup on Mac - Apple Support. The example they site (system files) is a particularly bad choice in my opinion so don't do that.
Next question: are your Contacts stored "On My Mac" or in iCloud? If it's the latter you can restore automatically created backups of Contacts. To do that, log into iCloud.com using your Apple ID, select Settings, and scroll down to Restore Contacts. It's all the way at the bottom under Advanced.
Good question. Did you exclude anything from the Time Machine backup? Read Exclude files from a Time Machine backup on Mac - Apple Support. The example they site (system files) is a particularly bad choice in my opinion so don't do that.
Next question: are your Contacts stored "On My Mac" or in iCloud? If it's the latter you can restore automatically created backups of Contacts. To do that, log into iCloud.com using your Apple ID, select Settings, and scroll down to Restore Contacts. It's all the way at the bottom under Advanced.
You sure can. Just launch the Contacts app, select the one you want to restore, and from within it select Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu.
You might also be able to undo whatever changes you did by using Undo.
John Galt wrote:
Good question. Did you exclude anything from the Time Machine backup? Read Exclude files from a Time Machine backup on Mac - Apple Support. The example they site (system files) is a particularly bad choice in my opinion so don't do that.
I've checked that but no I didn't exclude anything apart from another attached hard disk i didn't want backed up.
Next question: are your Contacts stored "On My Mac" or in iCloud? If it's the latter you can restore automatically created backups of Contacts. To do that, log into iCloud.com using your Apple ID, select Settings, and scroll down to Restore Contacts. It's all the way at the bottom under Advanced.
They're stored in iCloud. I found that I had to restore all my contacts from iCloud but it would do a backup before doing the restore. What I did then was the full restore, took note of the missing data from the one contract I was interested in, restored from the backup it had just made then corrected the details of that contract.
Many thanks for your help.
post.user_wrote.label:
You sure can. Just launch the Contacts app, select the one you want to restore, and from within it select Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu.
Many thanks for the reply. Previously I had always restored when viewing a file in Finder and hadn't realised that you could also restore when viewing something else.
However having tried to restore as you suggest I find that the restored contact is exactly the same as the current version no matter how far I go back in the TimeMachine. Why is this?
How to restore one contact from a time machine backup
