I want to access the documents from my Mac that I backed up using Time Machine on my PC. How do I do this?

Question

I can't take my iMac desktop with me to Colorado so I decided to take an old PC laptop I had. I backed up all of my Mac files using Time Machine onto an external hard drive. How do I access these files on my PC? When I hook up my new Seagate hard drive my DELL latitude D610 doesn't read it.

Answer 1

Your external hard drive is formatted as HFS+, the "Mac OS X filesystem". Windows cannot read it out of the box. You can try using one of the solutions mentioned here.

Once you can read the disk, navigate to BackupDiskDrive/Backups.backupdb/Latest, or the directory in BackupDiskDrive/Backups.backupdb/ with the most recent date as name. This directory contains the backup of the specified date and time and is an almost complete copy of your Mac's internal hard drive. Navigate to Users/yourname/Documents or a similar location, your documents should be accessible there.

If you use FileVault, all bets are off. No way you can access your home directory contents on any computer but a Mac.