If you are restoring a backup made by one Mac to a completely different Mac Note: If “You can’t restore this backup because it was created by a different model of Mac” appears when restoring a backup that was made on a different Mac, follow the onscreen instructions. Then use the “Restore From Time Machine Backup” utility.
With your backup drive connected, start up your Mac from the Lion recovery partition (Command-R at startup) or Mac OS X v10.6 installation disc. If you are restoring a backup made by a Mac to the same Mac Restoring your entire system from a backup If the file you are restoring has another file in the same location with the same name, you will be prompted to choose which file to keep or keep both. The file will automatically be copied to the desktop or appropriate folder. To restore, select the file/folder and click the “Restore” button. Highlight the file and press the Space Bar to bring up a quick look. Simply type the Spotlight search field and use the back arrow to have Time Machine search through your backups to find what you are looking for.īefore you restore a file, you can also use Quick Look to preview a file to make sure its the one you want. You can also perform a Spotlight search in the Time Machine Finder Window search field to find a file. In OS X Lion, portable Macs have the feature of local snapshots.
Dates in white indicate the data resides on your Mac. Note: Dates in pink indicate the data resides on your Time Machine backup device. If you don’t know exactly when you deleted or changed a file, you can use the back arrow to let Time Machine automatically travel through time to show you when that folder last changed.
You can use the timeline on the right side of the window to reach a certain point back in time (the timeline shows the times of all backups on your backup drive).