How do I recover files from Time Machine with different users?
1) Mac’s slowness never seems to be related to CPU. It’s always very low (<5%) even when I’m getting spinning beach ball or general slowness.
2) When I kill Photos and all those processes, still no difference. The system will hang if I click to open an email for example, or click somewhere in an already open app. It’s maddening. No idea what’s causing it.
3) As for the missing Photos projects, I tried your idea about entering TM while Photos is open and seeing if they show up in the sidebar. Two issues that arose from that.
a) When I enter TM with Photos open, it just opens a Finder window and gives me all the past backups of Finder windows. No way to see Photos.
b) It only has backups showing (when I enter TM) going back to when I started using the external HD as the startup drive. I think it’s because when I did that, I mistakenly named my user account differently that what it was previously. It’s now fullname, but it used to just be firstname. Can I change that? Files are all still on the TM drive, but not available when I enter TM.
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I would use Time Machine manually. In other words, instead of going through the Apple "space warpy" interface, just open a finder, navigate to your time machine backup. From there, you have to choose the correct path. If you didn't choose to inherit backup history when you went to the new drive, then it's possible time machine has two different backup folders; one for each drive. If it doesn't have two drives then there would definitely be two users as you described. But since you'd be in the finder, you'd just navigate to the older full name user and then go into the pictures folder. You would then pull the entire photos.library file out onto a different location, hold down the option key when booting Photos and tell it to open that library.
Another problem you could possibly run into would be permissions conflicts. If you get a message that says something like "you don't have permission to access" that file, then you would need to apply a different set of permissions. I won't go into that at the moment. But long story short, I never use Apple's space warp interface. I always just use the finder and find what I'm looking for within time machine's history manually.
2) When I kill Photos and all those processes, still no difference. The system will hang if I click to open an email for example, or click somewhere in an already open app. It’s maddening. No idea what’s causing it.
3) As for the missing Photos projects, I tried your idea about entering TM while Photos is open and seeing if they show up in the sidebar. Two issues that arose from that.
a) When I enter TM with Photos open, it just opens a Finder window and gives me all the past backups of Finder windows. No way to see Photos.
b) It only has backups showing (when I enter TM) going back to when I started using the external HD as the startup drive. I think it’s because when I did that, I mistakenly named my user account differently that what it was previously. It’s now fullname, but it used to just be firstname. Can I change that? Files are all still on the TM drive, but not available when I enter TM.
___________
I would use Time Machine manually. In other words, instead of going through the Apple "space warpy" interface, just open a finder, navigate to your time machine backup. From there, you have to choose the correct path. If you didn't choose to inherit backup history when you went to the new drive, then it's possible time machine has two different backup folders; one for each drive. If it doesn't have two drives then there would definitely be two users as you described. But since you'd be in the finder, you'd just navigate to the older full name user and then go into the pictures folder. You would then pull the entire photos.library file out onto a different location, hold down the option key when booting Photos and tell it to open that library.
Another problem you could possibly run into would be permissions conflicts. If you get a message that says something like "you don't have permission to access" that file, then you would need to apply a different set of permissions. I won't go into that at the moment. But long story short, I never use Apple's space warp interface. I always just use the finder and find what I'm looking for within time machine's history manually.
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