Pulling back one file, folder, or version — without touching anything else.
A granular restore retrieves a specific file, folder, or past version from a backup without disturbing the rest of the system.
This is the everyday restore. You overwrite a Keynote deck at 4pm and realise at 5pm that the earlier version was better. A client rejects the edit you committed to the Lightroom catalog yesterday and you want last week’s version back. You deleted a folder three months ago and now, looking for something inside it, realise you need it. In each case you do not want to roll the whole Mac back — you want one thing, from one point in time, dropped onto the Desktop.
Granular restore is the opposite of a bare-metal restore. Bare-metal is “rebuild the entire machine from scratch.” Granular is “restore this one file from last Tuesday at 2:14 pm, and leave everything else alone.” Both matter, and a serious backup product has to do both well.
In macup, granular restore is the default. Open the restore browser, scrub the timeline to the moment you want, navigate to the file exactly where it used to live, and drop it somewhere — back in place, or into a new folder if you want to compare. A 40 MB RAW usually lands on disk in under a second.