Time Machine HELP !

Hello,

I recently had a major restoration done to my macbook. Its pretty much a new computer, and the hard drive was wiped. I have everything backed up onto an external hard drive via Time Machine. I went in and tried to restore everything, and I thought it had worked, but none of my files are on my computer. And now when I go in to try and restore it again, the restore button doesn't work !

Does anybody know whats wrong? I have a ton of music and pictures and university work on the hard drive I need to access !!

Thank you so much,
Jessica

can you access your external hard drive without going through time machine?
i.e find it in the left hand panel of the nextwork list and click onto it??

Another reason to clone with SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, and have a bootable drive, rather than Time Machine.