Transcription
How to restore files from a Time Machine back up
Hey everyone. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to recover files from a Time Machine backup. So on this hard drive, I have my Mac backed up and I plugged this in regularly to get more backups on this hard drive. So if you've done the same. You can back up anything you've deleted as long as the backup is still there.
So what you want to do is plug your hard drive into your Mac, and then I'll show you how to restore any files that have been lost or deleted. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about and you don't have a time machine backup, watch my video on how to set up Time Machine to back up your Mac. So then if you ever in the future lose a file, you could recover it through this method.
When you plug in your hard drive is, should show up like this on your computer and you don't even have to go inside of the folder structure of the drive. There is a different way where we're going to recover a file. We want to come down here to our dock and we want to find system preferences here click that to open it up and in this window, look for a Time Machine this icon right here, press that, and right now it looks like it's doing a backup because I just plugged in the hard drive. We don't have to worry about that right now. I also have a Showtime machine in the menu bar. So if you do have this checked on, you will get the icon for it up here too and you can enter the Time Machine from here. So we want to make sure we check this on and right now we want to go ahead and enter Time Machine up here and when you enter Time Machine, you get a window that looks like this, where all your different dates are here on the right side. So if you deleted a file last week and you forgot all about it, you need to go back to a previous backup.
So I'm going to choose a different date here and as soon as I click it, It's going to take me back to dis date, and let's say, this is the file that I need to recover that I have now deleted since that backup. All I have to do is select a file and over here, I could just press restore. That when I copied it to my desktop and there it is, there's the file on my desktop and this is my current hard drive now. So it went into this hard drive, my time machine backup hard drive. You found that file for me, and I was able to recover it. Now, if you remember the folder where you deleted that file from. You could select that folder and then come up here and our, into our Time Machine from this page and it's going to take you back to this menu, but it's only going to show you the application folder. So now if I go back to a different time and select that date, it's only searching inside of my application folder here. So, if you remember, if you deleted something from the documents folder or the download folder, you could just start by selecting this and just search within that folder and when you find your item, just select it and press restores any will bring it to your current folder.
Thanks so much for watching this video. I post these types of tutorials every single day on this channel. So please subscribe. So you don't miss the next video. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you again.