It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.