Am not able to open time machine data due to 'insufficient privelages.'

Question

Try to explain easy.
- Have an old mac system backed up with time machine on an external hard drive (from a mac tower i was using last year.)
- Usually I can go into hard drive and take stuff off and put it on this one (laptop).
- decided today that all i wanted from the old tower backups was the music, so that I could delete everything else and backup this computer on the same hard drive.
- opened my hard drive, clicked on my old computer, users, music etc, but then I come to music folder and it says " Cannot open music folder because you do not have sufficient access privelages."
What can I do?
This is very strange... just want to take all the music from last computer and put it on this one and delete eveything else.
Any help would be amazing!
Love from the Island
x x x

Answer 1

natzje wrote:
Try to explain easy.
- Have an old mac system backed up with time machine on an external hard drive (from a mac tower i was using last year.)
- Usually I can go into hard drive and take stuff off and put it on this one (laptop).
Do NOT do that via the Finder with TM backups.
- decided today that all i wanted from the old tower backups was the music, so that I could delete everything else and backup this computer on the same hard drive.
- opened my hard drive, clicked on my old computer, users, music etc, but then I come to music folder and it says " Cannot open music folder because you do not have sufficient access privelages."
That is because Time Machine uses special "deny everybody everything" permissions on it's backups, to prevent us mere mortals from corrupting our backups by messing with them.
What can I do?
This is very strange... just want to take all the music from last computer and put it on this one and delete eveything else.
If you want to restore something from a TM backup, use +Enter Time Machine.+
If you want to restore something from a different Mac's backups, use the (badly named) +Browse Other Time Machine Disks+ option. Hold down the Option key while selecting the TM icon in your Menubar, or control-click/right-click the TM icon in your Dock. Locate and select what you want to restore, then click the "gear" icon in the Finder window's toolbar, and you'll get a prompt to specify the destination.