Restore folder from Time Machine

If I restore a folder from Time Machine, asking it to replace, will it
replace the whole folder or be clever enough just to replace the changed
files in the folder?

Essentially, because of certain problems, I can see the need to replace
a whole bunch of items in a folder using Time Machine. I'm not sure
exactly which items will need replacing, and replacing the whole folder
might be slow, as it's likely to be all the contents of my Documents
folder..

As an alternative approach to what I need to do, is there a nice simple
way of comparing the contents of two folders to see what files are
diferent - for safety I would want to include invisible files.

The issue is (and I've asked specifically elsewhere) that an external
device doesn't want to communicate with my computer. As it works ok when
I boot from a backup of a few days ago, the problem can't be with my
network or the device itself. Some file must have changed between the
backup and the current version, and i would like to find out what it is.

--
<http://www.decohen.com>
Send e-mail to the Reply-To address.
Mail to the From address is never read.

In article 1j8de18.k07qm6nhxlbsN%, Daniel Cohen at
wrote on 10/29/09 7:01 PM:

> If I restore a folder from Time Machine, asking it to replace, will it
> replace the whole folder or be clever enough just to replace the changed
> files in the folder?
>
> Essentially, because of certain problems, I can see the need to replace
> a whole bunch of items in a folder using Time Machine. I'm not sure
> exactly which items will need replacing, and replacing the whole folder
> might be slow, as it's likely to be all the contents of my Documents
> folder..
>
> As an alternative approach to what I need to do, is there a nice simple
> way of comparing the contents of two folders to see what files are
> diferent - for safety I would want to include invisible files.
>
> The issue is (and I've asked specifically elsewhere) that an external
> device doesn't want to communicate with my computer. As it works ok when
> I boot from a backup of a few days ago, the problem can't be with my
> network or the device itself. Some file must have changed between the
> backup and the current version, and i would like to find out what it is.


I'm not at all clear how invisible files inside of a folder are dealt with,
and I haven't a clue how to handle them individually when they can't be
seen. But I do know that you can tell TM to restore specific items, and when
you select them click on "Restore," you are given the choice of replacing
the existing items, or keeping them and placing the TM versions side-by-side
with the them (the existing ones then have their names appended with
"(original)").

(But I suspect you already know all of this.)

--
iMac (24", 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HDD) € OS X (10.5.8)