How to navigate time machine on mac
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You can enable this by choosing View > Customize Toolbar. For users of OS X 10.5, make sure the 'action' or 'gear' icon is present in your Finder window's toolbar. In OS X 10.6 you can right click on an item in Time Machine view and choose Restore to… which will let you choose a destination. If two items in the same folder are going to have the same name, you're prompted to keep only one or both. The file will then be copied to the Desktop or the current instance of the same folder it's located in, if it still exists. Once you've identified an item you want, you can restore it by selecting it and pressing the Restore button at the bottom right. In the case of music and movies, Quick Look will actually let you play them back. You can't open items directly in Time Machine view, but you can preview them by using this method. Once you have located an item, you can use Quick Look by selecting it and hitting to get a preview of its contents. If you don't know exactly when you last deleted or changed a file, you can use the back arrow to automatically travel through time to see when that folder was last modified.
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To use Spotlight within Time Machine, you can type a search term into the search field in a Finder window and hit the back arrow to make Time Machine search through its backups for that term. A bar along the bottom of the screen shows you the exact date and time of whatever backup of a folder you are looking at. If you run the mouse over this timeline you will see that it behaves a little like the Dock, magnifying itself to reveal more details about the time period you have selected and displaying specific dates for any backups that you mouse over.Ĭlick on one of these to jump straight to it. This causes the Desktop to slide away and be replaced with a screen depicting the various stages of the currently selected folder going back through time.Īlong the right-hand side of the screen you will see a timeline stretching from the present back to the first backup, complete with dates, and two arrows to navigate back and forth in time. By choosing to enter Time Machine from the menu bar icon, which you can choose to show in Time Machine's preferences, you will invoke the Time Machine interface.