Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hi, not sure I am in the correct forum but I'll post anyway. My sister uses a MAC, and bought a Passport (?) backup unit. She had her PC 'erased' at the MAC store at Fairview and when she went to recover her files, the Passport dialogue box says the files already exist and does she want to overwrite. I guess my question is... why is Passprt seeing the erased files, and if she choses overwrite, will the data that is on Passport be copied, or transferred? Thanks., Janet

She should check and see if there's another profile, on the computer. They may have backed up and restored the data, but under a profile other than the one she's logging into.

I am a little confused.

She had her "PC erased at the Mac store at Fairview"? Did you mean "she had her Mac erased at the Apple store"? After she bought the Passport at the Apple store?

I assume she went to the Apple store to fix her Mac, and when Apple found out that she hadn't backed up her drive, they sold her the Passport, backed up her Mac drive, and erased her Mac drive. And now, she is having trouble restoring her data from the Passport to her now-repaired Mac? Am I close?

If I got the story straight, a big if, then she should just bring her Mac and the Passport back to the Apple store and have them restore it for her. Simple and safest way to do it.

Yc

Upon re-reading, maybe another possibility....

Maybe, Apple did not erase her drive.

Either way, I still think she should bring everything back to Apple.

Yc

Well the story is, she went to the Apple store, they erased her data and told her to go home and reload the data from her passport, they would not do it. So yes, "And now, she is having trouble restoring her data from the Passport to her now-repaired Mac?" is true. Question is, if she reloads the data from passport to MAC will the data be erased from Passport, or will a copy of the data be downloaded from Passport?

That's an excellent question. How did they back it up on the Passport in the first place? Time Capsule? I've only used it once and it was a long time ago but if I remember correctly, the backup process has the ability to restore data only. This means, your data will be restored and you'll still have your backup in case something goes wrong with the backup process (ie. blackout).

The backup will always be there to be used as the source when applying to the target. That is of course unless you are just simply drag n dropping in which case you're now "moving" the data.

Again, it depends how they backed it up. Why they won't do the restore is an odd thing. You'd think they'd at least given you the steps to do it instead of just letting you do it yourself blindly.

Thank you all. My sister is now a happy camper, she did the restore (no drag and drop, thanks to Toolz) and all is well.
Janet