Possible to restore from Time Machine backup?

[Tech Raider]

A family friend called, all upset -

She is running Quicken in Windows XP on a OSX Yosemite iMac.

This person is an older lady - She always knew that she - should stay up on her backing up using Quicken's Backup to her Flash Drive. or to her external drive. But long about May she tells me - she quit doing that - She doesn't have any Snapshots at all. She knew that she had an external drive that was backing up "Everything" with Time Machine. Which it is. So, she thought she was covered by what Time Machine was backing up.

I am somewhat familiar with Virtual Box - I have searched through the community - and I have found certain things that apply, but it looks like there are complications possible to restoring from a given day on Time Machine (Prior to the loss of file)

So: Is there a way or process to: Restore her Virtual Machine....... - to regain back the use of her Quicken Account ?

[mpack]

What files can you or she recover from the backup?

If you can recover a complete folder, containing the <vmname>.vbox and <vmname>.vdi files (these are the only necessary files), then you can reproduce that folder somewhere on the local hard disk and use the Machine|Add... menu item to register the .vbox file in VirtualBox. If snapshots have not been used then you should have no problem with this.

The above advice assumes that the VM is gone from the host and needs to be re-registered - i.e. even if you got a new host this would work. If the VM is still present but the files are corrupted, then just "restore" into the same folder, and you can skip the registration step.

I'm not a Mac user so I'm afraid that I can't give advice on how to recover files from the backup system.

[Tech Raider]

Thanks for any reply - This is a first post for me - I appreciate the help!

Referencing your question: Time machine has the complete folder - that holds, for the date when everything was still operating fine, no issues.
(1) Logs Folder
(2) xxx.vbox file (Blue Box Icon)
(3) .vbox-prev
(4) xxx.vdi file (Red Box icon)

What would be the process to use these files in Time Machine and get her Virtual Machine restored - thus fixing her two corrupted Quicken - - - bank accounts in her Account Group

I appreciate all your help - and I told her that I had posted this - she said to pass on her Thanks too.

[loukingjr]

Open Time Machine, with the uncorrupted folder highlighted, click the Restore button.

[Tech Raider]

Ok great! Tomorrow is the day I goto her house and try the restore process - between what you have said, and a few others here. It appears to be as simple as what 'loukingjr' has suggested.

I will let you know after I try restoring the folder.

[loukingjr]

It is very simple. Just be sure you go back far enough in "time" to where a known good folder is.

[Tech Raider]

Sorry I have not been back in touch - While I had no real issues - there was a strange thing - First - I want to thank you all for confirmation - the restore process went well.

I will see if I can explain something strange that did happen. In her Quicken she had 3 account groups - Let's call it: A - B - C Two of the accounts were not a problem - they were not the accounts that I was needing the Restore file - inside of the Virtual Machine. So when I arrived I backed up the two account groups that were functioning perfect. To restore I needed to go back to Oct. 26 to get back in behind the corrupt account group. This would take ALL the account groups - accounts - back to October 26th - and once the success of the restore process was completed, I would need to take the flash drive that I first backed up the two perfect account groups when I arrived, so that once all the account groups were taken back to pre-October 26th - I could bring the two account groups to the date I arrived Oct. 23rd - So I Restored the two account groups back to the status when I first arrived that day. Everything goes well - there are no catasrophies - Other than the lady will need to restore manually from the hard copy - the transactions between Oct 26th and Nov. 23 - A sure success - considering without the Time Machine backup of the Virtual Machine, she would have had to manually enter in many many transactions back to May 28th.

So I left - then she called a few days later - saying she didn't understand why the two good account groups - that I had restored to the current Nov. 23rd status, which should have required no manual entries at all -she said - that the last transactions that were there went back to a misc. date in Sept. - Sept ! How could a backup file - that was backed up on Nov. 23rd - prior to the Restore of the Virtual Machine - - then I restore the Virtual Machine to Oct 26th - then I restored the two good account groups to the Nov. 23rd status - with entries within a few days of 11/23 - and those are not there - even though I just that day backed up those account groups - but instead goes back to EVEN BEFORE the Oct.26 date - almost a whole month behind! So it seems that - the Virtual Machine that was in place when I did the Nov. 23rd backup - when the Virtual Machine of Oct. 26th is current and in place - it effected the restore process using the Flash Drives to clear back in Sept. - I am sorry - It is hard to explain what happened - maybe there is someone on the forum that sees right to the point of what happened to the backup and restore process - when the Virtual Machine was taken back in time about a month - I don't know - I hesitated to even mention all this - this is only if you have a good guess as to what went down - with what I am able to give you. Thanks and have a good holiday season!

[loukingjr]

Perhaps I am missing something. Time Machine does incremental backups. My understanding was she had an XP guest which had 3 Quicken accounts on it. One of which was corrupted around the end of Oct. To get back the un-corrupted acct. you would have to restore the guest at a date before the corruption. Which would mean any entries after that date would be lost for all the accounts. So if you used the Oct. 26th date to restore from, The guest would be exactly as it was on the date.

As far as Flash Drive backups of the Quicken data, that has nothing to do with Time Machine.

[mpack]

Lou - out of curiousity only - are you saying that Time Machine does differential backups a la snapshots? I would regard that as insane (if you corrupt one backup, all future backups are corrupted too?!). Or are you simply saying that if back up a corrupted host file then you get a corrupted backup copy? - which is of course expected.

[loukingjr]

More or less they are differential backups. Time Machine is a little complicated in the way it works but the short versions is, it saves so many hourly backups, then daily, then monthly. So it only saves any changes done to the host. So if you did have a corrupted file that was saved to a backup, you would either have to restore it from the previous valid version, or fix it of course. However, in my 2+ decades of using dozens of Macs and however long Time Machine has been available (8 years, I looked it up), I have never had a corrupted file. At least not one I knew about or affected anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28OS_X%29

[mpack]

Ok, so the monthly backup would be differenced relative to previous monthly backup, or even not differential at all, so a corruption of a differential daily backup would be automatically healed. I guess that's a reasonable balance between speed, robustness, and backup frequency.

[loukingjr]

Seems to work out ok.