Any OSX experts? Retrieving photo's from an old back up?

I haven't bought a non Apple PC since 1994, but these days they are really starting to piss me off.

It used to be with older versions of Time Machine that if you wanted to retrieve something like a photo you could look through the back up and retrieve it. Not any more.

Last year our old Mac book pro up and died. We were in the middle of buying a rental and needed a computer right now so we went and bought a new one. At the time we didn't retrieve any of the old back ups, but that wasn't an issue.

Now we need some pictures from the old one, I can't berkeleying figure out how to retrieve them, or how to do a restore from the old data. Not that we could do a full restore from the old one to the new one as the new one is solid state with no optical drive so has a smaller, errr, hard drive so not all the data would fit.

Can someone tell me how to find my pics?

Apple used to be dead easy to use, not any more. With a PC I could just go down through the folders and find the pics I want. You can't do that with TimeMachine info.

Any help would be appreciated, just pretend you are communicating with an idiot!!!

What was wrong with the old one? It may be easier to get that fixed and dump all the data back on there.

Mind you, I'm pretty sure I was able to restore a couple of single files from my time machine backups last year, but that was pre 10.10.

No a bad idea. The keyboard/touchpad went wacky, it's probably a simple(ish) hard wear fix. But still I'd like to know as we need the photos pretty soon.

IIRC, migration assistant can pull a user's account off a backup from a different machine.

OK, so you have a dead Mac that used Time Machine to back up to ... where? A Time Capsule? This is where I get lost - your data went somewhere, either another drive inside the original Mac, or an external drive somewhere. Need to know where that disk is.

Once we know where Time Capsule was sending data, we've got somewhere to start from.

I've done this sorta thing before, but not without a bunch of research (this from a linux sysadmin and iOS dev), and not remotely. My suggestion? Call Apple, or schedule a visit to the Genius Bar. I've found them to be quite helpful.

Longer version (IIRC) - you have to do some sleuthing around on the Time Capsule drive to expose the archive file that contains the Time Machine backups, then you open that file and you can pull out all your old files.

If you post here with a description of where this data was going, I may be able to point you to some how-to guides.

peter wrote: OK, so you have a dead Mac that used Time Machine to back up to ... where? A Time Capsule? This is where I get lost - your data went somewhere, either another drive inside the original Mac, or an external drive somewhere. Need to know where that disk is.

External hard drive

peter wrote: Once we know where Time Capsule was sending data, we've got somewhere to start from. I've done this sorta thing before, but not without a bunch of research (this from a linux sysadmin and iOS dev), and not remotely. My suggestion? Call Apple, or schedule a visit to the Genius Bar. I've found them to be quite helpful. Longer version (IIRC) - you have to do some sleuthing around on the Time Capsule drive to expose the archive file that contains the Time Machine backups, then you open that file and you can pull out all your old files. If you post here with a description of where this data was going, I may be able to point you to some how-to guides.

This is the issue. I can connect the external drive to the new machine, I can see the backups, but you can't just drill down through the back ups to find files these days. It's somehow encrypted or something.

I'll have to call apple, you don't seem to be able to make a genius bar appointment these days unless you've talked to a person at apple first. Being able to go to the genius bar at will was one of the big plusses to apple in the past, they are rapidly burning their bridges with me, although the rest of the family have never used anything else so would be lost.

Rant, Apple used to be simple.aarrgggghhhh

This sounds like what I remember from the times I've recovered files.

"Double-click on the sparse bundle so that it mounts as a virtual disk. then control-click on Time Machine in the dock and select "browse other Time Machine disks". it will let you browse the old backups and restore what you want where you want to. to restore something, select it, click on the "gears" action button in the toolbar and select "restore to...". You can also run Migration Assistant on the mounted Time Machine backup and import your whole user and/or applications"

source

Does this help?

Easiest answer: usb keyboard and mouse on the old compy.

Well I spent 40 mins on the phone with Apple last night and I have access to the pics. I can right click (Control symbol and click) in iPhoto and choose what directory to use, then select the iPhoto backup on the external hard drive.

I can't just do a recovery from all my old data because the new computer doesn’t have the hard drive space the old one did. With the newer retina display machines they have gone away from optical hard drives to solid state. The new machine only has a 258Gig flash storage so I can't recover everything.

It still pisses me off I can't just drill down through the folders on the back up and look at individual files.

Glad you got your photos!

I don't know anything about iPhoto backups, but I know that for the primary library, (the .photolibrary file in your Photos directory), if you right mouse on the file and select browse package contents, you can dive down into the files. Don't edit/remove any of them, as that might really screw things up, but it's easy to copy them outta there and paste them somewhere more convenient.

If you can't do this with the backup, it's likely because the backup is compressed.

Apple hides these file away so that they can keep users from screwing themselves over (harder to accidentally delete photos... arguably), but more importantly, so that iPhoto/Photos can offer fast photo browsing and searching, and things like the ability to revert an edited photo back to the original, years after editing it.

Anyhow, glad things worked out for you. And don't worry, I'm sure there's something over in Windows land that would irk you just as much, if not more, if you knew about it now