Reply To: Time Machine – retrieving deleted files

[Paul Einarsen]

Try this: Hold down Option and when you click on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar you’ll get “Browse other disks.” Choose the disk and you’ll be launching into a Time Machine browse view. The Finder window works just like it does on your hard disk. Click into the column view so you get a preview image of content and type a letter in the Search window (or something in the title if the client can remember). That will bring up the complex search tool (you can delete text in the “search” now). and you can search on “kind is movie”. You can try adding another line with “created date is after XXXX” and an another with “created date is before XXXX” to narrow to a range, but old video files sometimes had the date stamps in odd places so that may not help. There’s also an option in “Other” for “year recorded” that I’ve never used. You will likely get a lot of videos and have to scroll through. In column view you’ll get a preview in the right column when you click on one and using the spacebar you can launch a preview of the clip. If it’s what you want you can right-click on the file and chose “Restore to . . .” to put it on your desktop or a collection folder. I’ll post this to the forum too. Let me know how if it works.