Setup: I have Mavericks running on a MacBook Pro. I backup to a ReadyNAS RAID array (via WiFi most of the time, via ethernet if I have a lot to xfer).
My primary drive started failing, so I had it replaced with a 1TB SSD. (Yes, it's much faster than what I had before!!!) During initial setup, I asked it to restore from the TimeMachine backup.
It restored some -- not all -- files. For example, files I had added to /Applications were not restored. But a bigger problem was in my home directory. Among other directories, ~/Projects (containing all my development projects) wasn't restored at all.
Using the browser, I navigated to /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/MacBookPoor, where I can see all the TM backups (including the symlink at Latest). I can also see various versions of my ~/Projects directory inside its subdirectories. Not surprisingly, not all versions contain all the files. For example, Latest/MacBookHD/Users/r/Projects only contains the two most recent projects I was working on.
So I assume I need launch TimeMachine to restore the full set of Project directories. When I launch TimeMachine, I can see "Today"'s files, and I can see all the *dates* of previous backups. But I can't navigate to those previous backups: the dates are displayed in purple (as are the "forward" and "backward" buttons), and clicking on them has no effect.
Since I can see the files under /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/*, I know the data is actually there. But I can't get TimeMachine to display them in order to restore them. Why isn't Time Machine able to access the backups?
(P.S.: For the time being, I will keep TimeMachine backups disabled -- I don't want the system touching the known good Time Machine Backup files.)
My primary drive started failing, so I had it replaced with a 1TB SSD. (Yes, it's much faster than what I had before!!!) During initial setup, I asked it to restore from the TimeMachine backup.
It restored some -- not all -- files. For example, files I had added to /Applications were not restored. But a bigger problem was in my home directory. Among other directories, ~/Projects (containing all my development projects) wasn't restored at all.
Using the browser, I navigated to /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/MacBookPoor, where I can see all the TM backups (including the symlink at Latest). I can also see various versions of my ~/Projects directory inside its subdirectories. Not surprisingly, not all versions contain all the files. For example, Latest/MacBookHD/Users/r/Projects only contains the two most recent projects I was working on.
So I assume I need launch TimeMachine to restore the full set of Project directories. When I launch TimeMachine, I can see "Today"'s files, and I can see all the *dates* of previous backups. But I can't navigate to those previous backups: the dates are displayed in purple (as are the "forward" and "backward" buttons), and clicking on them has no effect.
Since I can see the files under /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/*, I know the data is actually there. But I can't get TimeMachine to display them in order to restore them. Why isn't Time Machine able to access the backups?
(P.S.: For the time being, I will keep TimeMachine backups disabled -- I don't want the system touching the known good Time Machine Backup files.)
Last edited:
