Time Machine For PC Archives

If you use Time Machine for a full backup with deep archives from macOS, you can manually delete any of the hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots that the app makes and retains. If you launch the Time Machine app, navigate to a Finder window and then a date, you can then right-click and select Delete Backup.

Generally, you should let Time Machine take care of this. It automatically deletes older snapshots over time, which in turn removes only files that were changed at intermediate points (between weeks or days or hours) from the previous backup, but retains all the recent revisions. Ultimately, for files that don’t change very often, you may be left with just a single copy of the file as it also appears on your live disk drive.

Macworld reader Spider writes in asking a question related to a recent Mac911 column about how Time Machine backs up files, wondering about deleting these snapshots. “How does a user know when deleting a snapshot might be deleting the last hard link to a particular file?”

It’s a fantastic question and requires a little noggin time to sort out interconnected issues. (My first thought as to the answer was wrong, in fact.)

• The first time Time Machine creates a backup on a target drive or for a target computer, it copies all files as a baseline.
• Subsequent backups only include changed files, and use (as noted in the above article) the special hard link style of file pointer to make each snapshot look and act on disk as if it’s a full backup.
• Automatic snapshot deletion ensures at least one copy, always the most recent copy, of a file remains.
• Deleting snapshots manually removes a combination of hard links, which don’t affect the original file, and updated versions, which do.

It’s possible to delete all the snapshots between the initial backup and the point at which you’re going to town removing things, and have no intermediate versions nor the latest version. You can also select a file, click the gear (action) icon, and choose to Delete All Backups, which explicitly removes all copies of the file from the Time Machine archive. (You can read this column, too, about how Time Machine retains files deleted from your live working system.)

Apple provides surprisingly little documentation about all this, however, so my general suggestion is that you let Time Machine cull snapshots automatically, which it does as a drive fills up. If you find that you want to use a drive for Time Machine and other purposes, I’d recommend partitioning it and allocating as much space as you want for a deep archive.

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We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently along with answers and links to columns: read our super FAQ to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to mac911@macworld.com including screen captures as appropriate, and whether you want your full name used. Every question won’t be answered, we don’t reply to email, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.

It’s wise to keep an archived backup of your iOS or iPadOS devices if you plan to test beta software. That way, if something goes wrong on your iPhone, you can restore the older, archived backup to fix it. Without archives, your new backups would automatically overwrite the older ones.

This post explains how you restore archived backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. We’ve included instructions for Windows and Mac computers, whether you back up using iTunes or Finder.

Related:

Why are archived backups so important?

Normally, when you make a new backup of your iOS or iPadOS device, it overwrites the previous backup, updating it with all the new data. That makes it impossible to restore older backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

This is disastrous if you’re part of the Apple Beta Software Program because if you revert to the normal software, you can’t restore backups you made in the beta program.

Fortunately, it’s possible to archive your iOS or iPadOS backups using a Mac or Windows PC. When you do this, it locks the backup so it isn’t updated anymore. The next time you back up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, iTunes or Finder creates an entirely new and separate backup.

We’ve already written about how to create archived backups of your devices for Mac users. So now, let’s explain how you restore an archived backup to get all the data back on your device.

How to archive iPhone backups on a Windows PC

Archiving an iPhone backup with Windows involves a different process to using a Mac. You need to locate the backup folder in your system files and rename it. That way, iTunes doesn’t recognize the folder and stops updating it as you make new backups.

Find your iTunes backups by going to:

1. C: Drive > Users > [Username].
2. App Data > Roaming > Apple > MobileSync > Backup.
3. Be sure to keep your renamed backup in the same location.

How do I restore an older backup of my iPhone?

It’s easy to restore archived iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch backups you already saved to your computer. Since Apple discontinued iTunes for macOS Catalina, we’ve written separate instructions for using iTunes and Finder.

Click the relevant link below to jump straight to the right section:

If you didn’t make an archived backup to a computer, you might be able to restore older iCloud backups instead.

Restore archived backups using Finder in macOS Catalina or later:

1. Unlock your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and connect it to your Mac using the Lightning-to-USB cable it came with.
2. Open Finder and select your device from the sidebar, under Locations.
3. If prompted, enter your passcode and agree to Trust This Computer.
4. Select the General tab in Finder, then scroll down to the Backups section.
5. Click Restore Backup… and select your archived backup from the drop-down menu. Use the date and time to see when you made the backup.
6. Click Restore.
7. Wait until your device restarts before you disconnect it.

Restore archived backups using iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC:

1. Unlock your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and connect it to your Mac using the Lightning-to-USB cable it came with.
2. Open iTunes and select your device from the top-left of the window.
3. If prompted, enter your passcode and agree to Trust This Computer.
4. Select the Summary page from the sidebar.
5. Click Restore Backup and select your archived backup from the drop-down menu. Use the date and time to see when you made the backup.
6. Click Restore.
7. Wait until your device restarts before you disconnect it.

Archive your backups to avoid corrupted files

Without an archive, later iPhone backups only save the data that has changed. This means if a file gets corrupted in one backup, that corruption is present in all the following backups too.

You should occasionally archive an older iPhone backup on your computer to protect against this possibility. Alternatively, find out what to do if you do have a corrupted backup in iTunes or Finder.

Dan is a freelance writer based in South West England.

He spent two years supervising repairs as a Genius Admin for Apple Retail and uses that knowledge to keep our troubleshooting guides up to date.

Long before that, Dan turned to Apple products from a musical background. Having owned iPods for years, he bought a MacBook to learn sound recording and production. It was using those skills that he gained a first-class Bachelor of Science in Sound Technology.

The Internet Time Machine, often referred to as the Wayback Machine, is one of the internet’s most important resources. Without it, years and petabytes worth of invaluable information would be wiped from the web without a trace.

The Internet Time Machine was founded on May 12, 1996, in San Francisco, California by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. Kahle and Gilliat also founded Alexa Internet, now owned by Amazon, which operates today as a web traffic analysis company.

The Internet Time Machine is found at archive.org, a non-profit website dedicated to creating a digital archive of all publicly accessible pages on the internet. It currently indexes more than 396 billion web pages, making it the most popular archiving service.

In this article, let’s talk about how you can use the Internet Time Machine and three different ways that it’s useful.

How To Use The Internet Time Machine

Using the Internet Time Machine is very simple, and it functions similarly to a search engine.

• To begin checking out the Internet Time Machine’s archived pages, navigate to archive.org in your web browser.

• At the top of this page, you should see a search field to the right of the Wayback Machine logo. In this field, you can input either a direct URL or search through a list of relevant domains by typing in a keyword.
• Searching by keyword will show a list of results by domain name, as well as the number of captures, or snapshots, for each.

• You can then click on a result to go directly to its list of captured pages. If you search by URL, you’ll be taken immediately to its list of captures (if any exist).
• On this page, you’ll see a visual timeline that shows all of the selected URL’s captures.

• Clicking on any of the years in this timeline will bring you to a page with a bubble chart calendar to help visualize all of the page’s saved data for that year.

• For days with more captures, the bubble will be larger. Green bubbles indicate that a date’s captures are mostly 301 redirects, while blue bubbles indicate standard captures. You’ll occasionally see orange bubbles, which indicate that the page was not able to be accessed during a capture attempt.

Pages do not have to be updated for the Internet Time Machine to recapture them, so keep that in mind.

Creative Ways To Use The Internet Time Machine

Now that you know how to use the Internet Time Machine, what can you use it for? There are many uses, both practical and creative, so let’s go over a few.

Relive Online Memories

It’s surreal to look back on what some of the web’s billion-dollar companies looked like around two decades ago. Some great examples are Yahoo! in October 1997 and Amazon in October 2003.

If you were someone who browsed the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you can probably spend hours reliving the internet from those days and getting buzzed off of that sweet nostalgia.

If you remember any of the popular websites from your childhood or early days on the internet, check if you can find them using the Internet Time Machine. It may even end up being the spark that reconnects you with some long-lost internet pals!

Hold People Accountable

Shifting from fun to serious, the Internet Time Machine is one of the best resources you can use when you want to hold a person or company to their word.

You may have heard some form of the adage “when you post something online, it lives forever.” The Internet Time Machine strives to make sure this holds true. Whether you want to prove a web page leaking your personal information, someone on Twitter posting something defaming, or anything of this nature, archive.org has your back—so long as a snapshot exists.

In September 2018, US appeals court judges ruled that the Internet Time Machine is an acceptable form of legal evidence. If a journalist reports something false or someone incriminates themselves through a web page, the Internet Time Machine doesn’t forget.

Analyze Business Competition

Depending on your side of the situation, the internet’s way of enabling quick and easy “learning” from online business competitors can either be either a very good or very bad thing. If you’re a new business owner trying to get your foot in the door, studying and following other successful websites is a safe path to growth.

If you’re privy of a website that gradually gained popularity in a way that you’d like to emulate, the Internet Time Machine is your one-stop solution to seeing how it evolved over the years. This can help you better gauge how you should shape your own website’s content, SEO, and more.

Online Tech Tips is a great example. Back in 2007, it looked much different and was much less popular. The website has gone through some pretty significant changes, albeit nothing groundbreaking, but please… don’t copy us!

The Internet Time Machine is much more than just a way to check out how popular websites looked in the past—but, if that’s what you’re into, it works perfectly. 

The three examples here are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many other ways that this service is useful, such as getting past a paywall. It’s completely free and always available, so be sure to add the Internet Time Machine to your arsenal of web tools.