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External drive in Time Machine not showing up

S

Soundhound

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 29, 2006
614
4
I had a drive not show up on the desktop recently. It did this for the better part of the morning, then after some restarts etc, it showed up again. I've ordered a replacement and will replace it soon.

While I was searching for a way to replace the files on the drive, while the drive wasn't showing up, I looked in Time Machine, but the drive didn't show up in past iterations in Time Machine. Once I got the drive to show up on desktop, it again appeared in Time Machine.

My question is, shouldn't Time Machine be a picture of what your setup was at times in the past? Shouldn't I have been able to see that drive looking back a day or so or more? If not, I don't get it. If I drive goes down, how do I restore files from it if I can't see it in Time Machine?
 
No matter what the UI shows you the backups should still be on the Time Machine disk if you look through it with Finder. I guess the UI wouldn't show it to you because it's designed to only show snapshots of disks that currently "exist" in your setup.
 
So if the disk currently is not showing up, but the files that I want to retrieve through time machine are normally stored on that disk, how do I use time machine to retrieve files if that disk is currentl;y not viewable?

Kahnyl said:
No matter what the UI shows you the backups should still be on the Time Machine disk if you look through it with Finder. I guess the UI wouldn't show it to you because it's designed to only show snapshots of disks that currently "exist" in your setup.
Click to expand...
 
Unfortunately you'd have to use Finder. I haven't looked at a Time Machine disk in Finder in a while but I think everything's named pretty intuitively.
 
Is that really how Time Machine works? If an external storage drive goes down, you can't see that drive in Time Machine? Even though the backup files in truth aren't saved on that drive, they're saved on the drive designated to hold the Time Machine backup files? Doesn't make any sense....

Kahnyl said:
Unfortunately you'd have to use Finder. I haven't looked at a Time Machine disk in Finder in a while but I think everything's named pretty intuitively.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah that'd do it. Open Time Machine and a Finder window will pop up in front of the stars. At the top of the Finder window will be the name of whatever folder you're in (probably your Home folder). Right click the name of the folder and you'll get the heirarchy list. At the very bottom of the list you'll see the name of your Mac. Click it and you'll see a folder with your main harddrive. Go backwards in time until your external drive shows up next to it.
 
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