I got an external hard drive (My Book) for my iMac. Started up Time Machine and it did its backup. The next day I purposely deleted two files. Went into Time Machine and looked at previous day back-up. Could not find the files. Why? There are plenty of other files.
iMac
Time machine's backups are stored in a torturous form that is very difficult to understand when viewed from Finder.
The 'approved method' for viewing Time Machine backups is with Time Machine.app:
The late James Pond wrote an amazing set of interrelated illustrated articles for all things Time Machine. This is his article on viewing backups:
His articles were written just as Time Machine was undergoing its last major changes. You may see references to older versions of MacOS, but almost nothing about Time Machine has changed since he published his articles.
Any files that were still present on your Mac at the date&time shown for that backup SHOULD still be showing in Time Machine.app window as of that date&time.
Anything deleted before the date&time shown in the window will only exist in windows with an older date&time, before the deletion.
Eventually, as your backup disk approaches full, the older backup sets will be deleted, and those files will no longer be in any backup set. (Time Machine is not an ARCHIVE Uitility, it is a fancy backup application.)
Thanks, I'll read the article, but I was going through the time-machine app. It looks somewhat like the screen shot above with timeline, back-up dates etc.
What files are these that you deleted and are then looking for?
What directories are they in?
They were pdf's that were in my download file.
Downloads is a folder that is kept on a per-userid basis.
Are you logged in with the same userid you were using before?
Yes. I'm the only user of this computer, there is only one userid.
Time Machine
