You best bet is to use an external drive. That requires enough storage space, of course, either on the startup volume, the Time Machine volume, or another external drive that can be plugged in at the same time as the Time Machine backup. Resume a backup: Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, then choose Back Up Now. Pause a backup: Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, then choose Skip This Backup. If Time Machine appears in your menu bar, select its icon and click on Enter Time Machine. Launch Time Machine, which is in your Applications folder. Time Machine lets you peer within the Photos Library to retrieve specific images, but I would suggest the best course of action with the highest chance of success is to retrieve the entire archived library. On your Mac, do any of the following: Start a backup: Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, then choose Back Up Now. Here’s how to restore an entire Photos Library. I typically recommend not mucking around inside that package unless you have a corrupted and unrecoverable Photos Library. However, it contains lots of pieces, including the original versions of every imported image and video, thumbnails, an organizational database, and files that represent modifications you’ve made to images.

Here you will learn how to enter and use Recovery Mode on Mac.

If you have a very large drive or haven’t performed any Time Machine updates in the months since you last had access to the drive, the old Photos Library’s state should be preserved.Īssuming that’s the case, we can proceed.Īpple treats the Photos Library (located in the Pictures folder) as an integral thing: it has a single icon and you interact with it like a file. Recovery Mode on Mac is a build-in mode designed for you to recover the Mac and repair disk problem. Time Machine retains weekly snapshots until a drive becomes too full to keep the oldest ones.

Mac time machine restore progress bar