How to manage multiple Time Machine backups on and off your Mac

With Apple, you can use Time Machine to back up all data files, apps, and other things that aren’t part of the macOS system installation from your Mac. (Before macOS 11 Big Sur, you could also back up system files, but now you’re reinstalling the system.) It’s flexible enough to connect multiple volumes that Time Machine alternately uses as backup targets. You can also have a set of volumes that you switch between your Mac and external storage, swapping them as often as you want to keep backups up to date elsewhere.

Every time you mount a Time Machine volume mounted on your Mac, it is added to a round-robin cycle. The next time it’s due, the Time Machine algorithm brings it up-to-date against the previous backup stored on that volume. If you keep multiple volumes mounted, some intermediate versions of files are stored on one Time Machine drive and not the other, even though there is always at least one version stored for each cycle of the full set of drives.

What happens when you want to browse for files to restore on all the volumes you use and have used for backups, or when you want to limit browsing to a specific volume? Or when you don’t have access to the computer from which the backups were made?

In macOS 12 Monterey and earlier versions, clicking the Time Machine icon displays the menu item Enter Time Machine. By default, backup snapshots of all currently mounted Time Machine volumes for your Mac are displayed. In macOS 13 Ventura, the label changes to the more descriptive “Browse Time Machine backups.”

However, if you want to restore files from a specific backup, hold down Option while clicking the Time Machine menu and choose Browse other backups. (This option hasn’t changed since just after the first versions of macOS with Time Machine.) You’ll see a dialog box listing the available volumes. Choose one and click Use selected disk. As you browse for files and browse snapshots, you will see only the available versions on that disk.

That menu option also lets you select volumes created on or for other Macs, including disk images you’ve double-clicked to mount from a Time Machine volume on the network. You can browse that volume and select files to recover by selecting it, but it’s essentially the same as navigating the volume in the Finder.

For networked Time Machine backups, mount the disk image and then figure out which snapshot you’re looking for. You can then dive into that snapshot to copy files. For more information, see “How to find a Time Machine backup for an offline volume.

This Mac 911 article is an answer to a question from Macworld reader Lynn.

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