Time machine and external hard drive.

[FAYMONDO]

My imac hard drive broke and I have managed to get about 90% of stuff I need back on the new hard drive.

I was using time machine for back ups. I have a freecom 160gb external hard drive.

I only seem to have one partial back up available which says its in progress.

All my other back ups have gone.

The external HD however is showing 26.8 gb of 153.4 gb available.

I assume all my previous data is on there but how do I get to it ?

I really now only want to rescue some excel files , pictures and movies. as I have loaded all stuff back onto my new internal HD.

Thanks for any replies

 

[carlosbutler]

did you reinstall OSX with the time machine backup? if not then all you need to do is just plug in the hard drive, and go to the backups and then just a date folder, then it should all be there

 

[lostngone]

My imac hard drive broke and I have managed to get about 90% of stuff I need back on the new hard drive.

I was using time machine for back ups. I have a freecom 160gb external hard drive.

I only seem to have one partial back up available which says its in progress.

All my other back ups have gone.

The external HD however is showing 26.8 gb of 153.4 gb available.

I assume all my previous data is on there but how do I get to it ?

I really now only want to rescue some excel files , pictures and movies. as I have loaded all stuff back onto my new internal HD.

Thanks for any replies

The two ways I know to restore from a TM volume are...

Stick in the boot/install DVD boot off of it then go to the utility menu and click "Restore System From Backup..." It will then search for TM volumes and present you with a list of restore points.

The other method is to Install the OS and then when it finished it will ask you if you want to move a user and you can select an option from a TM volume.


You should be able to do the same thing from the "Migration Assistant" in the Utilities folder on your Mac.

 

[FAYMONDO]

The apple shop reinstalled OSX.

I put office and all other software back on and had pictures from my old PC and ripped songs back from my ipod.

Just a few excel files and pictures I would like. The rest is back on.

No backups show when the HD is mounted but as mentioned the GB is used on the HD.

 

[lostngone]

The apple shop reinstalled OSX.

I put office and all other software back on and had pictures from my old PC and ripped songs back from my ipod.

Just a few excel files and pictures I would like. The rest is back on.

No backups show when the HD is mounted but as mentioned the GB is used on the HD.

What happens when you go into "Migration Assistant" and select "From a Time Machine backup or other disk" then Select a/your user and then click the triangle to the left of that user?

What may have happened is because it was a fresh install and not a restore what may have happened is if Time Machine was setup again it may have erased you previous TM backups and started a new Backup of your freshly installed Mac.

 

[FAYMONDO]

Nothing shows up in the select the system to transfer.

Done a scan of the HD using a trial (stellar pheonix) and there is 123.7gb in 625562 files in 177506 folders.

It seems I might of trashed the restores and thats why nothing is showing up.

 

[FAYMONDO]

Is there a way to bypass time machine and just get into the HD files and pick what I want off as its obvious the stuff is still on there just no restore points.