My iMac has had a fit of the sulks and has been taken away for attention by Apple Care. I had it hooked up to a hard drive for Time Machine back ups. I'm now using my Mac Book Air and would like to know if I could attach that hard drive to the Mac Book Air and copy cross some files without doing fancy suff like configuring and without upsetting the hard drive so that I can continue using it when (hopefully) my iMac has come to its senses.
This discussion on Apple's forum suggests that you can, though I've never tried it. It sounds safe in terms of preserving your backup so you could try it. If your backup drive is encrypted, you'll need its password too.
Text from the thread (for convenience):
Plug in the drive in[to] the other computer, ** NO control-click on TM in the dock NO** Option click on TM in the menu bar and select "browse other TM disks". This will let you browse that TM disk as you usually would when using TM normally and restore what you want where you want to. If you try to restore something you'll be prompted for a restore location. there could be some permissions issues and TM might not let you look in some directories.
I have not shot myself, nor I am glad to say not done anything using a different vowel.
I read the Apple Forum stuff to the point where I was even more confused than usual. So I had a go (pause for applause). I plugged the TM cable (Thunderbolt enabled) into the Mac Book Air. I did a bit of control/option/command clicking on the TM icon in the Menu Bar and frightened myself even more. Then . . . . I noticed the TM HD icon on the MBA DeskTop (which I believe you snobs call the Finder). I clicked on this, got an appropriate window with the HD showing up as a folder. I clicked on this (gets boring) and so on until I got a window with lots of folders including one called Users. Opening this gave me 'Alan' (see left) and then the iMac DeskTop from which I was able to drag photos, folders and what have you onto the MBA Desktop as copies leaving the originals in situ. Bingo -:)) -:)) as TH would say.
It's nice that you now have your files but it's mostly a relief that you didn't shoot yourself. I suggest you save that for El Capitan, should it be anything like Yosemite (though the latter may be out of intensive care soon, my mouse even connects first time some days now).
Alan Cox 