Time Machine - Retrieve Information When Original External Drive is Gone?

[powerbook911]

Ok, so I have a 4 TB Time Machine.

To the point, it does not back up only my internal drive, but also two external drives.

However, I have noticed something. The one external drive I unplug sometimes to use somewhere else. When I do this and go into time machine, that drive no longer appears in the history.

Therefore, how would I ever retrieve things in Time Machine for one of these external drives, if they ever blew up completely and I couldn't reconnect them?

The information is in Time Machine, but it seems to not give me access if the original drive is not connected too? How do you get around that?

Thanks!!!!

 

[Mal]

You can manually retrieve it from your backup by looking at the Time Machine drive, inside of the Backups.backupdb folder. There will be folders for each backup, and inside there the names of each backed up drive.

jW

 

[powerbook911]

You can manually retrieve it from your backup by looking at the Time Machine drive, inside of the Backups.backupdb folder. There will be folders for each backup, and inside there the names of each backed up drive.

jW

Thank you. Just found this thanks to you!

So the "latest," backup will always have the full backup in it (i.e. the latest backup will never be just "pieces?"

 

[Mal]

Thank you. Just found this thanks to you!

So the "latest," backup will always have the full backup in it (i.e. the latest backup will never be just "pieces?"

Correct. It uses hard links to make the same files appear in multiple places, so files that were backed up in previous backups still appear in the newest backup, even though they weren't copied again and don't take up extra space.

jW