USB Hard drive arrived back from repair. How do I restore from Time Machine Backup?

[james-bailey]

Hey there, I regularly backup a LaCie 500mb USB Hard Drive which went into repair for a connector issue which has now been solved.

It has arrived back fixed, but obviously reformatted it.
I made sure that it was backed up via Time Machine before I posted it.

What do I do now to get TM to restore to the USB Hard Drive exactly how it was before I posted it?

I initially thought I could maybe just drag and drop the folders from the TM drive but then considered this could be bad move due to TM in the future thinking that these are all new files?

Hope this makes sense, any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks

James

 

[Dark Dragoon]

If you make sure the partition (drive) is named the same as before you sent it off for repair.
Then open the root of it in Finder, and then Enter Time Machine, does that show the previous backed up folders and allow you to restore?

 

[james-bailey]

Yep its named exactly the same 'LaCie'

I'll now plug the TM drive in and see what I can see when opening the LaCie drive in finder...

I havent done this yet as I was unsure about what would happen if TM began Sync'ing and then recorded the drive to be blank?

 

[chown33]

I havent done this yet as I was unsure about what would happen if TM began Sync'ing and then recorded the drive to be blank?

TM doesn't sync. It's not a syncing tool.

TM only does backups and restores. So it would see an empty "LaCie" drive and not backup anything. If you then added files to "LaCie", those would be backed up (eventually, at the next point when TM runs).

At any point, though, you should be able to go back to the point in time before the drive was erased, and restore those files. Unless it's been a very long time since that point.

 

[james-bailey]

Hey, yes when I viewed the emtpy LaCie drive within Time Machine it gave me the option to restore from when I last backed up so that was great news. Worked perfectly

However now...I have re connected my TM drive, hit backup and it is saying that there isnt enough space on the TM drive (another 300GB required)?

So what I have chosen to do is delete everything on the TM drive and set up time machine from scratch.

On doing this though, if I click Get Info on the TM drive, it still only shows 246GB available?? Can anyone tell me why this is? Its a partition of 700 GB?

Thanks