How to restore individual files from TM backup after clean install?

My teenage daughter's Mac Mini (running OSX 10.8) was cluttered with all sorts of stuff, even unwanted and inappropriate popup windows when using Safari, and more. So I made a final TM backup. Then I did a clean install of Mavericks.

Now, I wanted to bring back individual files and folders from that TM backup, BUT...

• going to Migration Assistant, I realized that it would overwrite the clean install and bring back the clutter. This is no option.
• going to TM, I realized I wasn't able to select any of the snapshots from the timeline
• going to the external drive containing the TM backup with Finder, all folders within her "old" user-folder showed a small red stop-sign, which I learned is an issue with permissions. I wasn't able to restore manually.

What to do now?

I know I could restore the cluttered state and copy folders and files manually to an external drive, make another clean install of Mavericks, then copy manually from that external drive. This seems a lot of time and work to me.

Is there an easier way?

Solution 1:

• going to the external drive containing the TM backup with Finder, all folders within her "old" user-folder showed a small red stop-sign, which I learned is an issue with permissions. I wasn't able to restore manually.

This is probably the easiest way to go.

You can fix the "red stop-sign" issue by opening Terminal and entering:

sudo diskutil disableOwnership /Volumes/[Your TM Drive].

You'll then be able to copy the files over manually, without having to worry about permissions.

Solution 2:

If you look on that Time Machine drive you should see a top-level folder named Backups.backupdb. If you open that folder you will see a machine name folder, inside that a series of dated folders representing individual backup instances. Inside each of those you will find "Macintosh HD" or whatever your hard disk used to be called. In there, find your files!

Here's what one of mine looks like:

You will not necessarily find ever file at every date, so you should have some idea of when the last good backup of the file you want was made.

Files appear not to be encrypted* or compressed so it should be as simple as just dragging them back to where you want them. I was able to restore a text file this way.

*you may have set your Time Machine backup to be encrypted... in which case it should not be encrypted once you have entered the volume password. If it is encrypted in this way you won't see anything.

One final note - you may need to authenticate as the user who made the backup to access the files. So if restoring to an account with a different username or password, be prepared to provide the correct details.