OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Using Time Machine to Restore Files

The point of having a backup is to be able to restore files—a process that Time Machine makes so visually spectacular that you'll find yourself looking forward to it. When you restore files, the Time Machine browser replaces your desktop with a starry background and a row of Finder windows zooming off into infinity, each window representing the Mac's files at a different point in time, as Figure 32.2 shows.

Figure 32.2

The Time Machine interface depicts a star field with windows stretching out back in time. You use controls to the right to move back through different instances.

Moving your backup to a bigger disk

As your Time Machine backup disk gets full—whether from backing up additional external disks onto it or from backing up the ever-increasing number of files on your Mac—you may decide you want a bigger disk to back up to. The process is not quite as straightforward as you might expect.

First, if you simply connect a new backup disk and set it up in Time Machine, that new backup disk will not have all the previous backups; instead, it starts from scratch by copying all your current files and then doing the incremental backup after that.

You might think that all you have to do is connect your new disk, copy or move the old files to the new disk, and then set it up as the new Time Machine backup disk. But if you do so, Time Machine ignores ...