I have just swapped my imac for a macbook pro and did a Time Machine backup to then restore. the problem I have is that the hard drive on the macbook isn't big enough to take my restore point.
I de-selected most of the user files and it restored. I now need to try and get the files which were in my "documents" folder. (30gb of them). Is there any way to mount the backup file so I can take a look at what's in there and selectively get hold of files??
thanks for any help!
Of course, you can browse your backup. Just navigate through :
/Volumes/[Time Machine Volume]/Backups.backupdb/[Computer Name]/Latest/
From there, go to your old home folder and select which files should be restored.
A Time Machine backup is really just a huge folder with many hard links to specific versions of a file. Within that structure, any folder shows you the full backup of that date (even though in fact only changed files will have been written to the backup, when Time Machine was running):
Image from Ars Technica
So browse to "Latest" and copy whatever you want.
(When you're using a remote backup, Time Machine might in fact be using a sparse bundle. Double click to mount it.)
