Time Machine is GREAT! However, what a lot of people don't realize is that many of your Apple apps are "Time Machine Aware." This means that you can restore deleted data right in the app itself without having to try to figure out what files you need to restore at the Finder level. For example, if you lost your Address Book or only certain contacts in it, would you know which files you needed to restore in the Finder to bring them back?

A true story!

Earlier this week I happen to notice that ALL of my MacGroup email was GONE! That's right, gone! All of it! The entire mailbox was EMPTY. It was gone from the Server too since I use IMAP mail. My other mail accounts/boxes were fine. Just my MacGroup email, all gone. At first I kinda just shrugged it off. I figured that it was gone (probably didn't need most of it anyway) and if there was something important that I needed to respond to, the person would write me again. Then I realized there was an important email that I needed to respond to and of course I couldn't remember the person's name, only the company and I didn't have them saved as a contact, so I had no way to remember their email address. I was feeling pretty bad about this, but again, what was I to do? My mail was GONE!



Well this morning it dawned on me that I had been backing up using Time Machine. I also remembered that Apple's Mail app was Time Machine aware! This meant that I would likely be able to restore just the missing emails without having to restore everything! So I brought Mail to the foreground and then clicked the Time Machine icon in my Dock. Time Machine fired up, connected to my Time Capsule and then allowed me to step back in time to the last day that my Mail box had mail in it. I then clicked the Restore button and within a few moments, Time Machine restored 671 messages that were gone. It even put them in a new folder so as not to screw up my existing mail that had come in since the restore. I can now decide to keep them all, move them back into the MacGroup box or whatever. I immediately found the missing message and responded to it.



The key here is to launch Time Machine while you have the app open in front of you that you want to recover data to. It works with Address Book and Mail for sure. Probably others too.

Life is good with Time Machine!

Thanks Terry. Great story and tip.

I agree that Time Machine is GREAT. It saved my bacon. I had to re-partition a hard drive to gain more space for some of the partitions (too many reasons to get into). Once I erased the drive, and re-partitioned it, a Time Machine backup allowed me to restore the info from the previous 2 (old) partitions to the newly partitioned drive. Great Stuff. Without Time Machine, it would have taken me days to accomplish the same thing.

Terry,

I was forced into trying the scheme with Address Book. It worked like a charm. It even allowed me to compare any duplicate entries. Cool Stuff. And, a huge time saver.