Trying to restore external HDD

I was doing regular backups of an external drive to my time capsule, and recently the drive crashed which required me to reformat it. I gave it the same name and thought I could restore it via Time Machine but when I select this drive under Time Machine I see no windows from past backups. Time Machine does not recognize that it is the same drive that I had backed up before. How can I restore this valuable information to my newly reformatted external hard drive?

If you copied the right folders from your Library / Mail folder, then I'd suggest you first set up Mail on your new MBA (if necessary look at screenshots of old account settings if you need to enter anything). Then quit Mail. Open the User/Library/Mail folder and see which new folders (empty) were created during setup. Open your copied old folders. If you have an inbox folder in both locations, delete the new one and replace it with the old one, etc, etc. If you have added your own folders (old), place the entire folder hierarchy into the new Mail folder. When done, open Mail - it should work.
Message was edited by: Barbara Daniels1

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    Message was edited by: nerowolfe

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