I found that many of my books and PDFs had been removed from iBooks.
I'm not sure exactly how it happened but recently I had both used the Storage Management app (to remove a few specific books) and turned on syncing on a new Mac that already had some books stored locally in iBooks.
Anyway, I can see that my remaining books are stored in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/
.
If I run open /Users/USERNAME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/
and then try to open Time Machine, I'm just brought to a Time Machine window for iCloud Drive and it appears empty, with no iBooks entry.
If I try to go to the specific folder in Time Machine (with cmd+shift+g) I'm just dropped back at the iCloud Drive folder again.
So how can I (1) check if my books were backed up by Time Machine and (2) restore them?
Best Answer
I found this was possible use the command line
tmutil
.First, I checked that the files were in my backup:
Check the iBooks folder was backed up
Restore to a temporary folder:
I then made sure iBooks.app was closed (and on iOS devices too) and synchronised the restored files into the right place:
I then opened iBooks.app and my books were back! iBooks spent 30 mins or so uploading to iCloud, and the books are also once again available on my iCloud devices.
Note, I attempted to directly restore from the backup to the target directory, but it failed, hence use of the temp directory and rsync.