How to retrieve a backup of an external hard drive from time machine if there is a drive failure of the external HD?

Hi,
I have a time caspule that I use as my backup for Time machine.
My itunes folder is on an external drive and When I do my backups, I connect my external to my mac so that my itunes folder will be backed up.
When I do the back up, I know its backing up the external due to the size of the backup.
but if my external were to fail, how do I retrieve the back up of the external? From what I can tell the drive has to be connected to the mac when connecting to time machine to access the back up files for the external. But if the drive is dead, how do I retrieve my files?

budden10, please try this:
Disconnect the external drive to simulate it not working or having failed
Open Time Machine on your Mac and wait a few minutes for your backups to load fully
Go back in time and select a date when you were backing up the external drive
Now look at the Finder window and locate your Mac on the left side of the window under DEVICES
Click on your Mac
What do you see in the window there just to the right?

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mhattonmd wrote:
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dacracot wrote:
My external hard drive has failed. It will no longer spin up and therefore is unmountable. Thankfully I had added it to my OSX Time Machine backups. So, since disks are cheap, I can just go buy a new, probably larger external drive and restore, right? But how do I tell Time Machine that this is a replacement and to restore to the new drive?
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Message was edited by: joshz

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I've just deleted iPhoto from my applications by mistake on my MacBook Air. But I do have a backup on Time Machine. Can I get it back from there? How do I do it? Thanks.

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How to retrieve a backup of an external hard drive from time machine if there is a drive failure of the external HD?

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