Help with Timemachine Backup...can't view files

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I know this is a Rookie question and many of you will be rolling your eyes but I am trying to help my father who has just bought a Mac...We recently purchased a Seagate Freeagent Go 320G external Hard Drive...I performed a Time Machine Backup and backed up all his files...He is mainly concerned about his Photos and Music...After the files backed up I deleted all the music and photos that were on his iMac....Now when you plug in the Hard Drive the only thing that Mounts on the Screen is a Timemachine Hard Drive Icon below the Mainharddrive Icon...When you click on it, it will just what is currently on the Hard Drive...It does say that there is 98G worth of files on the Drive but we can not access any of the content.

What am I doing wrong...I have gone to Disk Utilities and it does see the Drive there....Shouldn't their be a mount on the Desktop for this hard drive?? How do I access the files??? Was it a mistake to delete his files on the hard drive??
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.8 GHz 15" MacBook Pro OS X 10.7.x & some old Macs
First of all you shouldn't use TM as a storage device. Anything you have on TM might eventually be deleted once your external hard drive gets full as it makes space for current backups. Think of TM as a delayed deletion of your files. It will only keep backups of your files as long as it has space on the external drive.

Your explanation of how you accessed your TM is a little confusing. Are you saying you tried to access TM using Finder? The best way to access TM is to either click on its icon in the Dock or if it's not there then it's in your Applications folder. TM will show you the most current backup first. If your backup is current then it will look very much like what you have now so your Dad's music and photos won't be there.

You need to go back to the day that you deleted your Dad's files and restore them to his hard drive. If you want to permanently transfer your Dad's files to an external to save room on his computer's hard drive then you should get another external and manually drag them over. I repeat again...do not use TM to store files you have deleted off your computer.
 

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