Restoring Time Machine from two Macs onto one (new) mac

Question

My parents used to have two Macs...a "iLamp-style" iMac for my Dad, and an iBook G4 for my Mom. A while back, I had setup the iMac to have an external Firewire Hard Drive for a Time Machine Volume, and backed up both the iMac and iBook to that drive.

Recently, the iBook died and the iMac was really slow to work with. So my parents decided to replace the iBook with an iPad, and also purchased a Mac Mini.

I need to help my parents get their data from their two computers (backed up by Time Machine) onto the same machine. Pretty much everything is identical between the two systems (same apps, etc), however, they both have individual email accounts and photos that they want to retain.

Is it possible to do two Time Machine restores onto one computer?

Answer 1

You can migrate the home folders they were using via Migration Assistant.app, located in /Applications/Utilities. Unless they were going out of their way to store data in the wrong places, nearly all their user information should be there.

Detailed directions for using that app seems to be rare, but here is Apple's short KB about restoring from a Time Machine backup, you should be able to do this twice to recover both sets of home folders.

Answer 2

One option when creating a user account is to restore from Time Machine. Just restore each user's data from the separate TM backups onto the one machine.