MacOS – Access to MacBook Air backup files

backupmacospermissiontime-machine

I am trying to access some lost photos from a MacBook Air backup (I no longer have the computer). I am denied acess to pictures folder because I don't have permissions. How can I log in with password and get access? This was my wife's computer; she has the login credentials, I just need to know how.

I have a MacBook Pro laptop with OSX Yosemite, with Time Machine to a 2Tb G Technology G-Drive with USB 3.0. The backup I am trying to access is a 2013 file (G-Drive/Backups/LuAnne'sMacBookAir/Latest/MacintoshHD/Users/luanne/Pictures)

Clicking on "Pictures" denies access by saying "You do not have permission to open the document “Pictures”."

Best Answer

If you are an administrator (i.e. have an admin account) on the MacBook Air and are familiar with the command line interface you can use the sudo command to obtain machine-level admin rights. Once you have those rights, you can access the files in that folder.

An example of this might be:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ mkdir luannsphotos
$ sudo cp -R G-Drive/Backups/LuAnne'sMacBookAir/Latest/MacintoshHD/Users/luanne/Pictures/* luannsphotos

This is pseudo-"code", but essentially I've created a folder in your home folder, and then recursively copied the contents of that folder you referenced into this new folder.

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