Ok, I did something dumb and I'm hoping a guru can explain how to get back to good state. I have Mojave. I plug in my Time Machine disk once a week and let it back up (because I keep the disk not at my office, not my home, so if house burns down...) . Last time I backed up was Aug 13. Today is Aug 22. But of course it keeps snapshots local so I have certain "points in time" in Time Machine even up to last night.
I was in Terminal, in my /Users/myname folder, and mistyped an "rm" command somehow when attempting to remove a folder under /Users/myname folder. I saw that it began to delete /Users/myname/Desktop, then /Users/myname/Documents, then Users/myname/Downloads, then /Users/myname/Library. At that point it ran into some permission issues and that's also when I managed to hit CTRL-C!!!
So I thought ok, i'll just restore from time machine using "Enter Time Machine", and selected the last time before today, which is yesterday. Problem is I'm not 100% sure what all under /Users/myname got removed! And no, you can't restore one of those user folders. It says the OS needs it and it can't be restored. So I tried just restoring the desktop and documents and downloads. THAT worked. But Library is a whole other beast. Only certain folders came back! So lotsa my apps lost their saved context. I had to select individual apps under there like Firefox. Time machine's restore doesn't seem to crawl down all folders...
I thought I could just use Migration Assistant and restore the ENTIRE MACHINE to the "yesterday" backup but guess what: the only backup I could choose was "latest backup", AFTER i had plugged in the drive (which promptly backed up my messed up drive). So - do you not get to choose point in time to restore your WHOLE MACHINE like it was yesterday, or a week ago?
I was in Terminal, in my /Users/myname folder, and mistyped an "rm" command somehow when attempting to remove a folder under /Users/myname folder. I saw that it began to delete /Users/myname/Desktop, then /Users/myname/Documents, then Users/myname/Downloads, then /Users/myname/Library. At that point it ran into some permission issues and that's also when I managed to hit CTRL-C!!!
So I thought ok, i'll just restore from time machine using "Enter Time Machine", and selected the last time before today, which is yesterday. Problem is I'm not 100% sure what all under /Users/myname got removed! And no, you can't restore one of those user folders. It says the OS needs it and it can't be restored. So I tried just restoring the desktop and documents and downloads. THAT worked. But Library is a whole other beast. Only certain folders came back! So lotsa my apps lost their saved context. I had to select individual apps under there like Firefox. Time machine's restore doesn't seem to crawl down all folders...
I thought I could just use Migration Assistant and restore the ENTIRE MACHINE to the "yesterday" backup but guess what: the only backup I could choose was "latest backup", AFTER i had plugged in the drive (which promptly backed up my messed up drive). So - do you not get to choose point in time to restore your WHOLE MACHINE like it was yesterday, or a week ago?
