Learn how to restore files from Time Machine on your Mac.
In this lesson for macOS, I show you how you can use your Time Machine backup to restore files and folders you’ve deleted.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
Speaker: In the last video, I mentioned that we could also use Time Machine to restore files from an earlier backup. Maybe you threw a file away, and you want to restore that file, or you made a change to a file, and you want to go back to the earlier version. We can do this through Time Machine. Let’s see how we do this.
Let’s go to My Mac. The first thing you want to do is make sure that you have Time Machine in the menu bar. If you do not have Time Machine in the menu bar, what you need to do is you need to go to system preferences, and then you go over to Time Machine, and then you select ShowTime Machine in the menu bar.
We need to have this in the menu bar; I’m going to go ahead and close this window because this is where we go and enter Time Machine. When I go up to my Time Machine here, you’re going to see I have Enter Time Machine.
When I select this, what I’m able to do is I’m able to view my different backups. Remember how Time Machine makes multiple backups? If you recall, Time Machine makes multiple backups. Let’s go and open up Time Machine preferences again, and take a look at this. Select it, and you’re going to see we have Time Machine Keeps.
What it does is it keeps an hourly backup for the last 24 hours. I make a change to my computer; it’ll back it up. It’ll back it up within an hour. It keeps those backups for 24 hours. After that, what it does is it keeps daily backups for the past month. What I’m able to do is I’m able to go back to last week, Thursday, as an example. I could not go to a specific time, but I can go back to a particular day.
Then after that, we have weekly backups for the previous months. What we’re able to do is browse these different backups and restore files from those backups. How do we do that? Close this. We go up to our Time Machine here, and then we go over to Enter Time Machine and watch what happens. My computer is now entering in Time Machine.
Right now, I’m looking at my desktop. These are all the different backups for my desktop. How do I know what day I’m looking at? If we look, you’re going to see we have today now over on the right. To go back, I can click on these arrows. I’m going to click on the arrow here, and it’s going to go back to the previous backup, which is about an hour ago.
We can see that I had tulip time on my desktop about an hour ago. I’ve thrown it away. I can keep going back. I could click on the arrow here, or what I could do is I could go and click on any one of these windows here. When I click on the window, it brings it forward. Keep clicking brings it forward.
Now I’m looking at today at 2:52 AM. To bring it forward, I click on the down arrow. I can also browse other folders. If I click on documents here, I can see all of my folders and documents in my documents folder from December 28. Let’s go forward. I’m going to click on this.
Now I’m looking at January 3. I’m going to go forward again. Now I’m looking at January 11. I could even search for a specific file if I wanted to. Over on the right, you’re going to see we have these little horizontal lines. This is another way of browsing your history or your backups. I go over to the right here, and if I wanted to go to today at 4:30 AM, click on this, and it brings me to 4:30 AM.
Again, I’m still in my documents folder. I could go and select another folder to see what was in that folder because it takes a backup or makes a backup of your entire computer. If I wanted to go back to December 25, Christmas, and see what I did, I would click on this, and it’ll go back to December 25.
You’re going to notice that we also have a little red line here. What is this? This is a snapshot. I mentioned that the computer would take a backup or make a backup every hour to the external hard drive. Well, let’s say that the external hard drive was not available. This is particularly pertinent to laptops.
If you do not have an external hard drive plugged in, it will take a snapshot of your computer, depending on how much space you have. Then what you’re able to do is restore a file from that snapshot. It’s not truly a backup because if your hard drive were to fail, you would lose your snapshot and everything else. I don’t like to call this a backup, but you can restore files from that snapshot.
I could click on this, and I’d be able to see all of the files from that snapshot and then restore any one of them. How do we restore a file? Let’s go back over to my desktop here. What I want to do is I want to restore this tulip time brochure. I click on it, and all we have to do to restore a file is click on restore. When I do this, let’s go ahead and do this. What it’s going to do is it’s going to restore that file from that particular backup, and it’s going to place it on my desktop. It’s going to restore back into my desktop.
If I restored a file from my documents folder, what it would do is it would restore it to my documents folder. It restores it to the original folder.
That’s how we use Time Machine to restore files on the Mac.