My father deleted all his text messages from his iCloud account yesterday. By the time I found out about it, it was too late to restore them from the iCloud backup. Is it possible to restore them from my Time Machine backup of the Mac he uses? I have a backup from the day before he deleted them.

I have a disk that was a Time Machine backup for some photo files. I now want to use that disk as a regular disk. Can I do that without erasing the photo files?

I set up netatalk on Ubuntu to backup via TimeMachine to one partition there over my network. I can connect to the partition through the Finder Go... menue. But I cannot see an option to create a new folder. In TimeMachine this backup disk does not show up. I tried using this Ubuntuusers' wiki ...