07-22-2009, 12:00 AM

BACKGROUND:
I am actually on my third iMac in one month (I have upgraded all the way to a 24" now). I have three folders on my time machine drive which is hooked to a 1TB external HD and respectively named iMac1, iMac2, iMac3, with iMac3 being the newest 24" folder. I just did a restore from a Time Machine backup on my brand new 24" at the start of OS X setup so I could have all my settings, programs, etc. be the same...the problem is, the restore that it implemented was from July 9, not the 21st so some things have changed.

PROBLEM:
Time machine will not read my older backups (so I can go back to a few hours ago and restore) because they are all in folder iMac2. I tried copying iMac2 to iMac3 (the newest folder), and it will not let me move files.

WHAT I NEED ANSWERED:
Long story short, I just want to move the files from my two older machines (iMac1 and iMac2) into the iMac3 folder to make them accessible to restore too.

Thanks for everyone's quick responses!

07-22-2009, 01:27 AM

I think what you will need to do is insert your restore disk, hold down C to boot to it, then restore from the correct backup. You will have the option to select which backup on the disk to use. As far as I know there is no way to combine the backups from different systems.