Finding specific files in Time Machine archives

So I have a whole bunch of audio files of different lines from 2001: A Space Odyssey on my computer. Or at least I did. They seem to have disappeared without a trace, and I can't track them down.
Is there any way to search the archives of Time Machine for specific file names or wildcards? It seems to me I can only browser the folder tree, but I don't recall where on the drive I may have stored the files.
dt

Peggy Lynn wrote:
Go to the finder and type Command-F. Type in the name of one of the files you want to recover in the search window. Beneath the search window click on File Name. Then without clicking on anything else click on the Time Machine icon in the dock. Click on the back arrow and Time Machine will take you back to the file when it was last backed up. If you click on the file it will show you the path in the bottom of the window. Then you can go to that folder, select all the files you want and click on Restore.
Peggy, I tried your method described above. I've had a folder that used to live on my desktop but that I deleted some time ago. Inside I had a file, collage2.tif. After entering the name and click File Name (and at this point, I get the result window showing no found file - I had not clicked on anything else in the search window), I click on TM's icon. In TM, I click on the back arrow, and TM goes back in time, but doesn't show the file. [In fact it goes back to the very first back up.] However, if I look in the desktop folder and inside the subfolder that I had deleted (it shows up now since I've gone back in time), there's the file. I then checked to see if that folder/file existed on a more recent date (I wondered if TM want back in time to the most recent day that file existed) and sure enough, it exists in more recent days.
I've tried this several times, searching "This Mac" and "Desktop", but TM doesn't find the file, even though I can manually find it.
Message was edited by: pvonk

Similar Messages

HT201250 How can I find a file on Time Machine.

The file was on my Desktop at one time but has been deleted. Typing it's name in the TM Spotlight field and clicking the Back Button (per the TM tutorial) doesn't work. Has anyone found a specific file on Time Machins that is no longer on the Mac?

First of all, I don't work for Apple and neither do most people who post here. This is primarily a user community.
The documentation is correct, even if you didn't have any success. I prefer to use mende1's suggestion, so I don't use Spotlight in Time Machine.
I understand you are frustrated, as I would be if it didn't work. Computer frustration isn’t one of my favorite pastimes.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Feedback

Why can't I find these files in Time Machine?

I've been trying for quite some time to copy my old time machine backups to a new drive.
Yet my folders seem to get scattered after copying.
Attached are screenshots of the error messages I get while copying my time machine backups. I have a strong suspision that my problem mainly has to do with the files that can't be copied "ds. Store" and "team fortress"
I don't care for these files, and I'd gladly delete them from my time machine backups. Yet I can't find them in my time machine backups.
How do I fond them?
And has anyone else had this same issue as me?

Here are the photos.
I wasn't able to upload them using my phone.

How do I find a file in Time Machine?

I get time machine. It just works. But my questions is, how do I locate a file that I know was backed up but I have no idea when the last time it was actually present on my system? Is there a way to just search like in Spotlight but have it show files that have been backed up?

Open a Finder Window.
In the Finder Window, search for the file you want, select "file name" or "content", make sure "This Mac" is selected.
Click the Time Machine icon, in the dock, it will open on "Today".
Click on the back arrow to go back in time.
If the file was backed up, TM will go back and find it.

Finding iweb files in time machine

I accidently deleted a section of my website but TM has it... I think. Does it? Does TM backup iweb? I can't seem to find the files under domain or .sites. I'm at a frustrating loss. Anyone.... bueller? anyone...
Thanks.

Peggy Lynn wrote:
Go to the finder and type Command-F. Type in the name of one of the files you want to recover in the search window. Beneath the search window click on File Name. Then without clicking on anything else click on the Time Machine icon in the dock. Click on the back arrow and Time Machine will take you back to the file when it was last backed up. If you click on the file it will show you the path in the bottom of the window. Then you can go to that folder, select all the files you want and click on Restore.
Peggy, I tried your method described above. I've had a folder that used to live on my desktop but that I deleted some time ago. Inside I had a file, collage2.tif. After entering the name and click File Name (and at this point, I get the result window showing no found file - I had not clicked on anything else in the search window), I click on TM's icon. In TM, I click on the back arrow, and TM goes back in time, but doesn't show the file. [In fact it goes back to the very first back up.] However, if I look in the desktop folder and inside the subfolder that I had deleted (it shows up now since I've gone back in time), there's the file. I then checked to see if that folder/file existed on a more recent date (I wondered if TM want back in time to the most recent day that file existed) and sure enough, it exists in more recent days.
I've tried this several times, searching "This Mac" and "Desktop", but TM doesn't find the file, even though I can manually find it.
Message was edited by: pvonk

Where to find video files in Time Machine?

I'm still not figuring all of this out apparently. Hours later I have backed up my computer onto an external HD via Time Machine. I wanted to check & be sure my videos are on there before I delete some from my hard drive & when I use finder to open Time Machine (the external HD), I cannot find anywhere in there that there are video files or even all of my (1000+) photos from Iphoto... where would these be listed? I don't see titles of the programs or folders called video or photo or pictures or anything along those lines. I even did a search of the drive for .mov and got nothing....
Help!

You should never, NEVER use Finder to view or manage files on a Time Machine back-up.
With the Time Machine drive mounted, click the Time Machine icon at the top menu bar. Amongst the choices that come up is, "Enter Time Machine". A "Finder-like" set of windows hovering in outer space will open with your back-ups layered by date of the backup (shown below). Once you navigate to (using the big silver arrows), find the date you want, click on the folder icon in the window that will navigate your way to the file(s) you want to see, or restore.
At that point you can "see" whether the files you wanted to check on are there. You can also restore any files you wish to do so, by highlighting (clicking a file or folder), then hit the "Restore" button at the bottom right of the window.

Scheduling a specific file into time machine

I use fusion to create a virtual pc. I would like to have it backed up in Time Machine either every time I use it, once a day, or a time I specify. How can I do this? The file is 29 GB
Thanks,
Fred

I'm afraid it's all or nothing if you want things to work automatically. Otherwise you have to use the TM preferences to exclude the VPC folder and let "normal" backups happen; then remove the exclusion and do a manual backup. Then exclude it again.

Remove specific files from Time Machine backups

My Time Capsule is getting pretty full and I know it will delete the oldest backup first, but looking at the oldest backup via TM, its full of some huge video files which just happen to be in the next three or four backups as well - but not exactly the same as they were edited each time.
At 16Gb a shot they would be ideal candidates for trashing without deleting the rest of the backup. Is it possible to delete individual files within a backup leaving the rest unaffected ?

Graham Outterside wrote:
I managed to remove the relevant files off the oldest backup copies as far as I can tell - they do seem to have disappeared from view. After a few restarts of the computer however I notice that the sparebundle file is still the same size.
that's because a sparse bundle does not automatically compact when you delete some of the contents. you can compact it from terminal if you really want to but there should be no need. new backups will take the freed space in the bundle eventually.
to compact a sparse bundle you need to run the following terminal command
sudo hdiutil compact /path/to/sparsebundle
put the correct unix path to the sparse bundle in the command. an easy way to get it is to drag the bundle to the terminal window. make sure that all the space in the command are correct.
Looking at the backup logs for subsequent backups I got;
Starting standard backup
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.18 GB requested (including padding), 11.57 GB available
Copied 4730 files (344.7 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 1.27 GB requested (including padding), 11.57 GB available
Copied 243 files (416.4 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup /Volumes/Backup of Graham Outterside’s Computer/Backups.backupdb/Graham Outterside’s Computer/2009-09-22-212457: 11.57 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.
Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Whats interesting is that TM is deleting the oldest backup POST SL and not going back to try and delete the oldest backup which is May 2008.
I don't know why this would happen. did you do a regular install of SL? did you make any hardware changes to the computer?
Secondly the files deleted from the May June and July 2008 backups have not affected the sparsebundle file size.
I am fairly sure its a'user account'issue and this user cannot delete the oldest backup or thin down the sparsebundle as its owned by the older pre-SL user.
no. this has nothing to do with user account issues. TM runs for the whole computer as root and does not care about individual accounts.
not sure where to go from here to get any hard disc space back as its just going to keep deleting recent copies in prefernce to old ones.

Upgraded to Mavericks, can't find files on time machine

I have an external hard drive where I backup my Macbook Pro. I recently upgraded to Mavericks and now I can't find old files on time machine. I am looking for a file around a certain date, but no matter what date I look at in time machine - the files and data seem to be the same. I hope someone has a solution to my problem!

Hi Miax1,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!
I understand that you are looking for a specific file in your Time Machine backup. It sounds like you are familiar with the interface but just cannot find the file. Just to make sure you are searching in the right area, I suggest reviewing the Restoring data from Time Machine backups section from the following article. Please let me know if you need further assistance.
Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Restoring specific files or folders
Choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu. The restore interface appears. You can literally see your windows as they appeared "back in time."
You can use the timeline on the right side of the window to reach a certain point back in time. The timeline shows the times of all backups on your backup drive. If you don’t know exactly when you deleted or changed a file, you can use the back arrow to let Time Machine automatically travel through time to show you when that folder last changed.
Note: Dates in pink indicate the data resides on your Time Machine backup device. Dates in white indicate the data resides on your Mac. In OS X Lion v10.7 and later, portable Macs include local snapshots.
You can also perform a Spotlight search from the Finder. Simply enter a search term in the Spotlight search field, and use the back arrow to have Time Machine search through your backups to find what you are looking for.
Before you restore a file, you can also use Quick Look to preview a file to make sure its the one you want. Highlight the file and press the Space Bar to bring up a quick look.
To restore, select the file/folder and click the "Restore" button. The file will automatically be copied to the desktop or appropriate folder. If the file you are restoring has another file in the same location with the same name, you will be prompted to choose which file to keep or keep both.
I hope this helps,
-Joe

How can I easily delete duplicate files in old Time Machine archives?

I have multiple older Time Machine archives from different Macs that I have been going through manually and picking files out and copying them to another drive file by file. I'm running into massive quantities of duplicate files and the biggest problem is muliple iphoto pictures including the same picture in different sizes.
I wanted to give up and just throw the whole Time Machine archive onto another disk so I could format the one it was on and use it for something else. But I got a message reading, "The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled." So I went to manually copy each "Macintosh HD" folder for each date into it's their own respective folders. It worked but required my password for each folder and each of the 19 folders were all ~75GB. Which is impossible because all of that data was on a 500GB drive.
What should I do? This has become a two month long nightmare.

I really don't know exactly, but since no one else has a answer I'll give it a shot.
I don't know much about TimeMachine at all, however I did assist someone that their TM was corrupted and they needed to salvage what they could off the drive, so I'll start with that.
There is software called Data Rescue and it's designed to read the 1's and 0's of any data on the drive, deleted or not, regardless of the file structure, and output the results to another drive.
TimeMachine tries to save space, so it uses what appears to be duplicate files, but contain no data as they are placemarks for files in later states that went unchanged from the previous states.
If Data Rescue has the option of recovering files independently of the file/folder structure this would result in all your files from the recoved TM drive being on all one level on the second drive.
From that second drive one could run software called DeCloner, which would flag the actual duplicate files of content, not just by name.
The next stage perhaps would be to eliminate files with no data, the placeholders, using the Finder "size" as a sorting option.
Saving all this remaining content to another drive to work on further, perhaps all the remaining image files can be seperated, sorted according to largest size, the largest ones (usually the ones you want to keep as they contain more quality) and opened into iPhoto or Aperture for further refinement as you add a small batches of smaller image sizes in to compare with the larger versions for duplicates/unwanted sizes.

How to restore files from Time Machine after Clean Install of Mavericks

How to restore files from Time Machine after Clean Install of Mavericks. I know the data is there but seems unaccessable because I may have changed the Computer or Owner name. Is there any way to fix that now?

Hi Linc,
my back-up data is managed by Time Machine; the actual data is on a second internal Hard Drive with a capacity of 1TB - not partitioned. I am using Time Machine and have access to all data backed up since Mavericks Clean Install but not the data prior to this date.
When I open the 1TB drive in Finder I can see a folder "Backups.backupdb/Sigi's Mac Pro/ followed by many folders of backup dates going back to 2010-09-20-103441 and up to 2014-02-07-142414 all followed with folder Macintosh HD. February 7th 2014 was the date of the clean install.
These Backups are followed by backup date folder 2014-02-08-075554 with a subfolder of MacPro-320GB (this is the name I assigned to my Boot Drive during formatting; I suspect I should have assigned the same name as before ie. Macintosh HD) and 2014-02-11 with a subfolder Macintosh HD, these are the ones I get access to by way of Time Machine > Restore.
Weird thing is on Febr 11 when I relised my possible mistake and renamed the Bootdrive back to what it was initially ie. Macintosh HD despite this I have access to all backup data since the Clean Install in both folders MacPro-320GB as well as Macintosh HD but not to any data prior to the Clean Install.
Is there something that Time Machine knows and prevents access or is it simply a matter of renaming the subfolder 2014-02-08-07554/MacPro-320GB to ........./Macintosh HD?
I like to restore selectively and not everything - It was hard work reinstalling apps that were supposed to be the troublemakers (ref my discussion on Maverick problems) but I now need to get onto data specific to some of these apps as well as other data I may have missed. Long story? Yes and sorry.
Sigi

Cant access some of my files in time machine- says I dont have permission to view them.

Hi, I cant seem to find some of my older files in time machine. Says I dont have permission to view them. I recently had a new hard drive installed in my Mac and had all info restored to it then did a time machine back up onto my WD drive. Time machine window still seems to have the earlier dates and windows but I cant acces them. Anyone got any ideas how I can safely get them back? Thanks D

nastassjasouthend wrote:
I' ve been working in FC10
Specifically. what version number?
Russ

How do you retrieve individual files from Time Machine?

If a file original is lost or becomes corrupted, is there anyway to retrieve that individual files from Time Machine? If so, how?

ElRay (Amazingly, not the 1st) wrote:
SharonZ wrote:
Time Machine finds that file, and not other files that meet the criteria. BUT...
That's not what TM was doing. My search criteria was "by filename", however when I try to go backwards in TM, that limit is lost and it appears to be returning every file in the rolled-up weekly archive. This is especially odd, because I have since determined that the file was actually corrupted before TM was running, so there should be only one version of the file in TM's archives.
No, it was a file sitting on my disk. Email was mentioned, because the fact that every email in every junk folder appears as a separate item to be restored, which is what triggers that little "too many files to show you at one time" issue.
So your name search returned lots of junk mail items. I shudder to think what the file name was that you were searching for! <g>
Also: you can tell Time Machine to ignore your junk mail if you've filtered the junk mail in Mail into a different folder/box.
I figured that one out. I had used Spotlight to find the junk mailboxes, but couldn't, only the messages "labeled" junk. I had to use 'find' in Terminal.app to actually find Mail's junk & spam folders.
Yeah, it's hard to find stuff when you don't know where it is <g>. In general, though, for these kinds of things, always think: "Library" which is where SO many pieces of programs are stored. Of course, there's lots of Library folders, so your first job is to decide: system or user level? Realizing more than one user account could have email setups, you can assume the path you need starts at the User level. So, you start at Home[UserName]/Library. Scanning that Library folder, you see a Mail folder (aha!). Checking out that folder, you might first suspect the Mailboxes subfolder, but you'll soon see that it has the mailboxes you've defined for sorting your mail; so, you continue to scan the Mail folder and you see a folder with your email address on it (or multiple folders, one for each of your emails). Open one of those and, ta da! You see something labeled junk.mbox.
You've already found your Junk mail, of course, but I'm suggesting this as a general approach, especially for other readers of this thread, who might not want to touch Terminal.
But, back to one of your initial problems: TM seemed to lose your search criteria. Do you think it was related to the high number of " hits"? Does it work for you otherwise, when you search for something less general?

I can not access my files in time machine

I am trying to restore a file from time machine. When I try to select the file in time machine, it is not accessible. I can not select anything. Only the folder that was selected when I started time machine is highlighted and can be restored but I can not switch to a different folder or select a specific file.

This option was removed in v9.1.5
IPhoto menu -> Provide iPhoto Feedback

HT201250 Can I restore photo files from Time Machine without the use of an external drive? I'm trying to restore lost photo files and I see them listed in Time Machine (without use of an external drive), but when I try to restore I get a error code 36.

Can I restore photo files from Time Machine without the use of an external drive? While I was transferring photos back and forth from a thumb drive something went haywire and my IPhoto was wiped clean! When I click on Time Machine I see all the dated pages (without an external storage drive connected), go back to a date where all my photo files are there, click "restore", and I get the message: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in file cant be read or written (error code - 36)"

Thanks so much Terence. I tried some of the fixes from that page, but then discovered the suggestion to compress the Time Machine Back up of the original library and transfer it as a zip back to my computer as detailed here:
http://pondini.org/TM/E9.html
That worked like a charm. I really appreciate it.

Finding specific files in Time Machine archives

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