So last week I did a video on setting up Time Machine.
Once you have it set up it just runs automatically and it backs up your Mac every hour.
There are two possible uses for that backup.
One is if complete disaster strikes.
Like your Mac gets stolen or destroyed or the hard drive fails.
You can then choose, when you set up a new Mac, to restore from that Time Machine backup.
It will prompt you to do that.
The other use though is to restore a single file or a group of files that you may have
accidentally deleted or maybe modified in such a way that you really want the old one
back.
Let's take a look at how to do that.
I've got a folder here called Projects.
In this folder you'll notice a gap in the icons.
What I did was I created this folder a few days ago and I filled it with some sample
files.
Then yesterday I deleted a file and I emptied the trash.
So it's gone.
Now today I realize I made a horrible mistake and I need that file back.
So how do I get it back?
Well, I, of course, have been backing up with Time Machine, so backing up every hour.
So I should be able to go back in time and find that file.
Now if this was a clone backup, a clone being just basically a duplicate of your hard drive,
and I backed up last night to this clone then I wouldn't have any hope of getting this file
back because my backup last night wouldn't include this file.
So it wouldn't be on my backup.
But since Time Machine does these incremental backups and saves a history it's going to
have a copy of this file if I go back in time far enough.
So let's go and enter Time Machine by clicking on the Time Machine icon up here and you can
see that there's the option to Enter Time Machine.
I'll do that.
Now I'm doing that with that project's window open in the Finder.
So it knows this is what I want to focus on.
So now I see multiple project's folders going back in time.
On the right side I see a timeline and I can use these arrow keys to go back in time.
So this is now showing me right now what this folder looks like.
If I click here it will go back and it will show me earlier today.
I can continue to go back and it will show me each snapshot.
I can go through this morning and keep going back.
You can see the file is still not there because I deleted it yesterday.
Now I can speed this up a bit by going to the timeline and saying let's go all the way
to yesterday and let's go yesterday morning.
I'm pretty sure the file was there.
So we'll go yesterday morning at 10:24 a.m. and there is the Time Machine test.
That txt file.
Now I want to restore this file.
So I will click it.
Now at the bottom I've got a Cancel and Restore button.
If I hit Restore it's going to pull that file from the drive and place it back in the folder.
So now I've successfully pulled this file from a day and a half ago.
Now I can also do this with an existing file.
So I could have pulled an older version of the file and it would give me options of whether
or not I want to keep just the original file or the new one and the old one together.
So, you know, it doesn't automatically override what you've got there.
But you can go and grab an older version of a file.
So let's say if there's document you've been working on, you deleted some text from it
or you deleted part of an image in a Photoshop document.
Something like that.
You could actually go back and pull that older version and have both the current and the
older version and then go and copy and paste from one to the other to fix your mistake.
So that's the basics of how you pull a file from Time Machine.
Now I have some homework for you because the last thing you want to do is use this for
the first time when you really need it.
So I want you to do what I did.
Create a sample folder.
Fill it with some TextEdit documents.
Then remember, tomorrow maybe, to delete a file or two from it.
Then the next day go and use Time Machine to go back and recover that file.
See how it's done so you have confidence that you can do it when the time comes to recover
a file that you may have accidentally deleted.