HT204157 How do I go back to a year or more ago in Time Machine and recover photos I have since deleted?

My wife has a MacBook Air and a La Cie Rugged 1 TB external drive that she uses to back up to with Time Machine. She takes a LOT of photos, and so knowing that she had a backup available, has deleted many photos from the internal drive to keep the machine running.
Now she needs to find some of the photos she deleted, without know exactly when she deleted them, and she is finding that TIme Machine won't seemingly go back that far.
Why is this? More importantly, how can she get to the photos of family and friends that she is searching for?

Are your old files still on the other machine or hard drive?
If you've not used/set up Time Machine, whatever you did up to that point, is done. Once you set it up, it will save your drive's contents but it can't copy content that is missing.
If you stuff is still available on an old machine or drive, you should be able to find it and simply use target disk mode to connect the two machines and drag them over. Or, attach a portable drive, copy them there, then attach it to the new machine and copy them over.

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