Time Machine - Restore Mac Mail

[jsedrick]

Ok - I rebuilt my wife's three year old MacBook. Yes, I have a good time machine backup. However, when I reset the machine I set the user account to her name instead of "Mom". Now when I try to enter time machine I can only go back under MacMail to when I reset the machine.

Is there a way to go into Time Machine as "Mom" and then restore the Mac Mail mailboxes?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jody

 

[Detrius]

The easiest thing would be to run the migration assistant and do a proper restore of her user from the Time Machine backup. Then, delete the new user you created.

 

[jsedrick]

Restore of old account

I tried what you suggested. But unfortunately when i go through using Migration Wizard I only see my current accounts. But if I go through Time Machine to see the accounts backed up I see all of the previous accounts. Ideas?

 

[Detrius]

Yes, it won't work if you've backed up over top of the previous backups. You can boot from the Leopard or Snow Leopard disk and restore the entire system from an older backup, which means you'll be wiping the drive and then have to figure out how to recover the newer stuff from the backup.

You've really made a mess of things by creating new users and backing them up. It can be done because the data is there, but it's not simple.