Restoring Apple Mail and Your Emails from Time Machine
The hard drive on my PowerBook completely died the other day, but I luckily had been running Time Machine backups since upgrading to Leopard. (I wasn’t all that pissed off seeing as I was eager for an excuse to replace my wimpy 40Gb hard drive with a new 160Gb drive). I fumbled a bit, looking for a specific Apple Mail restore tool. I knew where all my emails lived, but I thought that Apple would have a specific means for restoring apps like Mail. So I created this mini-tutorial on how to restore Apple Mail from Time Machine simply because I could not find this method elsewhere.
Supposedly, If you attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application, you are presented with historical views of Apple Mail. This did not work for me, the historical views were just blank, so the steps below do not take this approach.
Restoring Your Emails from a Time Machine Backup
Warning: If you have already setup Apple Mail with your accounts and preferences, this will negate ALL your doings.
Note: This process will restore all your email accounts, preferences, passwords, smart mailboxes, etc.
The How-To
- Before loading Time Machine, open the Finder and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. In there will be a folder name “Mail”. Rename it to “Mail (default)” (Select the folder then hit the Return key to rename).
- Mount your Time Machine Backup Drive (ahem, plug it in).
- Control + Click the Time Machine Application and chose “Browse Other Time Machine disks…”. This, of course, brings up the historical view of your backups.
- Go back to your most recent backup (2nd window back) and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. Select the “Mail” folder and click the restore button (bottom right).
- Once the restore is completed, open Apple Mail and you will be presented with an import wizard (below). Simply follow through the prompts and you will be good to go.
That’s it!
May 13th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Thanks it’s a great hint, you should post it in macosxhints.com
May 19th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Awesome content and great instructions even for stupid people like me. Thank you so much for posting this. It worked like a charm and really is appreciated at 2:30 a.m. after hours of reinstalling junk.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:15 am
This worked. However, I had three email accounts, and it only imported one. My Smart Mailboxes were not imported either.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Raffy,
This tip is worth it’s weight in gold! Thanks so much for posting such a well though out recipe for a Mail Rescue operation.
Just put Jon’s advice on the article, that is also very valuable!
Take care,
Joseph Hurtado
from Toronto