

Highlight the file and press the Space Bar to bring up a quick look. Simply type the Spotlight search field and use the back arrow to have Time Machine search through your backups to find what you are looking for.īefore you restore a file, you can also use Quick Look to preview a file to make sure its the one you want. You can also perform a Spotlight search in the Time Machine Finder Window search field to find a file. In OS X Lion, portable Macs have the feature of local snapshots. Dates in white indicate the data resides on your Mac. Note: Dates in pink indicate the data resides on your Time Machine backup device.

If you don’t know exactly when you deleted or changed a file, you can use the back arrow to let Time Machine automatically travel through time to show you when that folder last changed. You can use the timeline on the right side of the window to reach a certain point back in time (the timeline shows the times of all backups on your backup drive).
