Time Machine Restore Issues

Hi,

I set up Time machine to start taking backups and so far the backups have been taken as expected. Today I wanted to test the restore feature and deliberately deleted one of my documents from the Documents folder. I then did a spotlight search and clicked the time machine icon. I was able to navigate to the time when this doc was last backed up. I then clicked restore, it came back to my finder and asked for my password. I entered my password (which is admin) but the file did not get restored to the original location. Instead i think it created another backup in the backup drive.

What am i doing wrong here? Please help.

Regards,
Sourav

I'm yet to work out how you set it up, instructions are as clear as mud

I first reformatted my external hard drive. Then I turned on TM in settings and excluded everything but my applications and home folder. It started taking backups by the hour as expected. Is there anything specific that you are looking for?

Thanks
Sourav

All I can say is I did the same thing as you did and zapped a Doc that I had a backup of on another system. Time machine restored it perfectly and fast.

The first time I attempted to restore a file, the same problem happened. TM restored the file to the TM drive not its original location.

The second time I tried, TM worked as it should. The first time I used a spotlight search to find the file I wanted to restore. The second time I just used the arrows to navigate back to a point that the file was backed up. I don't know if that had anything to do with why the first attempt failed. Its just the only thing I can think of that I did differently.

Hi Wot_fan,

I tried doing it your way and it works. But I am wondering why the spotlight method doesn't. Doing it this would require us to know where exactly the file was residing, right?

I have to believe that Apple will fix this in the next update. As you pointed out, as it stands TM is severely limited by this. I suppose you could search, make note of the time and date of the backup with the file you want and then manually find it. Not very elegant, but it should work.

I am interested to see how many others have a similar problem. Hopefully, there will be some more replies to this thread. If only a few people have the problem, I may dig deeper to see if one of the Apps on my machine is interfering with TM.

I dont like all the copies, i only want to back up once a week or month. So I tuned it on and after a backup to a external HD turned it off. I know this may seem odd to some but all the backups seem like a waste of energy and machine life. Also can you save your time machine back ups to an encrypted file. I dont want to use file vault but if someone walks off with your backup drive there is no security? Any thoughts?

Rob

Hi,

I followed what this discussion in apple.com asked me to do and that fixed the problem for me.

Hope it does for you to.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1200762&tstart=45

Regards,
Sourav