My iMac’s hard drive crashed. I just checked my external hard drive, and it says the last successful backup was about a month ago. How do I get the data off of my external drive without restoring the computer back that far? There’s still some important stuff there.
We’re sorry to hear about the loss of your iMac’s hard drive; drive failures are always incredibly inconvenient. Luckily, you have a Time Machine backup, and even if it isn’t very recent, something is still better than nothing.
The directory structure to your backup Home folder can be tricky, but it will contain all of your files.
Time Machine places a backup of your computer into a date- and time-stamped folder on the external drive. This is good because it means you won’t have to restore your Mac in order to get your data back. Simply plug in your drive and click on it in the Finder.
You will see a folder named “Backups.backupdb.” Click on it, and then click on the folder inside that has the same name as your old Mac. You will then see a group of folders with date and time stamps. However, we will be looking for an Alias folder called “Latest.” This folder will contain the latest backup of your old machine. Once in this folder, navigate to Macintosh HD > Users > Username. This folder will contain your home directory as it appeared during the last Time Machine backup. From here, you can drag and drop files and folders individually from the Time Machine backup drive to your current drive.
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