OS X Leopard includes a wonderful backup tool, Time Machine, that allows anyone to quickly backup their entire system on an external hard drive or Time Capsule.
In addition to allowing individuals to backup and restore from their own system, Time Machine also allows you to “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. This built in feature allows you to connect to any available Time Machine drive on your network and pull off any version of the file you’re looking for.
To Browse Other Time Machine Disks:
- Be sure that you are connected to the Other Time Machine disk. To do this you may need to connect to the computer the drive is connected to and login with user credentials or mount the drive by connecting to the computer (command+K in Finder) with its IP address and mounting the drive.
- After your computer has connected to the Other Time Machine disk, right click (command+click) the Time Machine icon in the dock
- Select the Other Time Machine disk from the selection window and click Use Selected Disk
After following the steps above, Time Machine should launch and display contents of the backed up data on the Other Time Machine disk.
Browse through the files to find what you’re looking for, select those files, and then click restore. Time Machine will ask you where you’d like to restore the files to on your current computer. Select the location and let the file restoration begin.
