Time Capsule

[Big Shisha]

The HD(running Leopard) in my macbook died, so I replaced it, put a fresh copy of Snow Leopard on it. I tried to restore everything from my time capsule backup, it put on the apps, but my music, photo's etc are missing.
I re-imported the photo's into iphoto, but the tags(event etc) are missing.

Is there an easy way to restore everything the way it was before the crash?

 

[r0k]

The HD(running Leopard) in my macbook died, so I replaced it, put a fresh copy of Snow Leopard on it. I tried to restore everything from my time capsule backup, it put on the apps, but my music, photo's etc are missing.
I re-imported the photo's into iphoto, but the tags(event etc) are missing.

Is there an easy way to restore everything the way it was before the crash?

You can browse around your Time Machine backup as follows:

1 - Connect to your backup volume (you may have to look at Time Machine preferences to refresh your memory what it is called).
2 - Browse to the drive that is mounted when TM starts to run
3 - locate a file with your name/machine name.sparsebundle
4 - right click/option click and pick "show contents"
5 - browse around inside the backup and find your iphoto library
6 - Copy the file
7 - browse to a spot on your machine where you normally don't keep iphoto stuff and pick paste (be prepared to wait a while for everything to be copied over).
8 - hold option when you launch iPhoto and tell it to use the library you just manually copied from your Time Capsule - your meta tags should be there. If they are missing or the file isn't readable, I'm afraid you're on your own...

BTW, I have a question. Do you allow iPhoto to copy photos to your iPhoto library when you add them? If so, when you restore your iphoto library from a backup, the photos need to be in the same spot on your machine they were when you added them or you won't be able to see them. I should also mention this is the best way to manage iPhoto. Don't let it copy your photos as it gets very slow when you get more than 50 gig of photos inside. I currently manage a 70+ gig iPhoto library with an iPhoto library "file size" of less than a few gig but I have to keep the original photos in the same folders they were in when I added them to iPhoto or iPhoto gets all dazed and confused.