recovering emails from external hard drive

[vmugmetoo]

Since Carbon Copy Cloner is supposed to duplicate everything on my iMac, I assume all my mailboxes complete with messages can be transferred back from my external hard drive to my iMac.

My problems are:

1. What are all files names and locations that I need to copy?
2. Once I have those, what do I now do with them?
3. Since some of those files are located in my User's Library and that is invisible, how can I access them? Using Option > Go > Library will only take me to the Library on my iMac, not the one on my external hard drive.

Thanks,
Tony Markle
Parksville

 

[DaveWT]

Most of your questions can't be answered without knowing (perhaps) what version of the OS and what mail client you are using.

But as to how to get to the User Library on your external drive, you could reboot from the external drive (assuming you have set up Carbon Copy Cloner to do a real clone of your internal drive, and then use your Option > Go > Library at that point.

For Apple Mail, once you have accessed your User Library you will find a "Mail" folder there. By comparing that folder with what is in the equivalent location on your internal drive you can decide which things you are missing and need to transfer back. Perhaps copying them to your desktop and then as a second step once you have rebooted from the internal drive and can access your User Library there again, complete moving them back to the proper spot there.

 

[vmugmetoo]

Thanks, Dave.

Using Mail with El Capitan.

Tony

 

[chas_m]

So are you saying you lost all your email on your Mac? How?

If you are trying to recover selected or a small group of emails, that would be easier using Time Machine backups, since you can simply open Mail, open Time Machine, and go back in time to the last changes (or a bit further back as needed to get the emails you want).

To replace ALL the emails from your external you would navigate (by clicking) to Users/[you]/Library/Mail, and copy that folder over to the same place on your boot drive. **BE AWARE** that this will completely overwrite your existing Mail folder. Likewise, copy and replace the "Mail Downloads" folder.