Time machine question and trash
I have time machine set up on my Mac and needed to get some extra space on my back up disk so I deleted some of the backups that were there in time machine. I can see them in my trash but cannot delete them due to the fact that it keeps saying the system is being used. Any ideas?
Consult Pondini for anything Time Machine.
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html
I think you have probably done something Time Machine does not like and will have to start with a new backup. Either have a drive only for Time Machine or at least a partition just for Time Machine and don't interfere with how it works, it will delete old backups automatically when it needs more space. I have Time Machine on partitions and leave it strictly to do its thing, have no trouble. You should have at least two backups, there's no such thing as too many.
Similar Messages
-
Time MACHINE question regarding hard drive restore...
Ok so i need to restore a hard drive with time machine. im going to be wiping my imac HD for a fresh install, hopefully things will run a little quicker. its seeming a little laggy these days. what im worried about with time machine though is that its going to restore all the little fragments of past installed/uninstalled programs and certain logs and settings ect.. the things that are currently bogging down the system. i know that time machine has a list of exclusions of what it doesnt restore.. but do i have to worry at all about time machine installing these things that i dont want? i would much rather just manually restore the system if this is going to be the case.
also, if i would manually restore the system from the time machine drive, i dont think i can just drag and drop backup folders from time machine and then pick and choose individual files and folders can i?
any help would be much appreciated!
just a heads up.. please dont reply if you're giving me your opinion because you enjoyed your experience with time machine restoration. im looking for fact and reality of what time machine does and does not restore. thank youD00bysnacks wrote:
Ok so i need to restore a hard drive with time machine. im going to be wiping my imac HD for a fresh install, hopefully things will run a little quicker. Its seeming a little laggy these days.
That's rather a drastic step, which most likely won't help much, if any. Unlike with Windoze, you're usually better off to diagnose and fix the actual problem. See Baltwo's post here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11853228�
what im worried about with time machine though is that its going to restore all the little fragments of past installed/uninstalled programs and certain logs and settings ect.. the things that are currently bogging down the system. i know that time machine has a list of exclusions of what it doesnt restore.. but do i have to worry at all about time machine installing these things that i dont want?
If you tell Time Machine to do a full system restore, yes, it will do that. With certain exceptions, such as system work files, trash, most caches and logs, it will put your system back just as it was. That's it's purpose, after all.
i would much rather just manually restore the system if this is going to be the case.
Really? See the pink box in #11 Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. Actually, it would be worse, if you don't use +Migration Assistant+ for your data.
also, if i would manually restore the system from the time machine drive, i dont think i can just drag and drop backup folders from time machine and then pick and choose individual files and folders can i?
You can't restore OSX that way. You can copy your data, but that may not work in all cases, and you'll likely have all sorts of permissions problems, as OSX will think the backups belong to a different user.
just a heads up.. please dont reply if you're giving me your opinion because you enjoyed your experience with time machine restoration. im looking for fact and reality of what time machine does and does not restore. thank you
You want free help, but only if it agrees with your version of reality? That's pretty cheeky. -
Time Machine questions: Handling backups for multiple Macs to one FW drive
I am reviewing the Time Machine thread and seeing a lot of helpful information, but I would like to ask something I haven't quite found yet.
We have 2 Leopard Macs, a MacBook Pro and an intel iMac... with plans to upgrade another MBP from Tiger to Leopard at some point.
In planning for Time Machine, we set up a 1 TB drive, attached it via FW 800 to the iMac, partitioned it GUID for Intel, and made 3 partitions, one for each planned Mac we want to back up to it.
I started Time Machine on the iMac first and the first backup of about 100 gb took maybe 4 hours.
Then we tried to start the Time Machine backup for the MBP over the network (wireless). It was understandably much slower and quit with some error last evening, so I took advantage of the pause to move the notebook to a wired ethernet connection. It got even slower so this morning I directly connected it FW 800, erased what had been backed up, and started over. So far, so good. 6GB out of 100 in 10 minutes or so. The idea being, if we can get the first backup completed faster over wired connection, maybe doing the incrementals over wireless network will be okay. Sounds like some folks are doing that successfully. I am hoping that works out.
Questions: Was it necessary to partition my 1TB drive into a partition for each Mac's Time Machine backup? I did make each partition bigger than the hard drive it is designated for.
To get the MBP to mount the external FW drive on its desktop, I had to disconnect the drive from the iMac. Is there any way I can connect the FW drive to both the MBP and the iMac (the drive has two FW 800 out connections, so it is physically possible)? I'm thinking (from reading posts of others with notebooks) that one strategy is to connect your notebook to your Time Machine drive at night and let it back up, but it'd be great if I could leave the iMac connected while doing so. Is there a way the volumes on the drive can mount on both desktops?
When I try wireless again, I'm seeing mixed posts regarding whether the MBP will need a password to log in to the remote volume each time, or only the first time when the Time Machine backup is established... if I could get clarification on that, it would be helpful.
Thanks!
thanksWhat do you see on your notebook when you click on your TimeMachine icon in the Dock?
My notebook is mounting the backup drive on an hourly basis, running a backup, and looking like it is doing something... but when I then look at TimeMachine, I can't see the backups. (On my iMac with the drive directly attached, I see a progression of windows showing all the hourly backups the last 24 hours, etc.) I just called Apple to ask why this is so, and they told me they couldn't help me because wireless Time Machine backups aren't supported.
I know backups to a hard drive attached to an Airport Express Base Station are not supported. But when they say "You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. +Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices+"... well, how can you DO that? -
Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)
Here's the deal:
I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
- Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
- Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
- Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...Final Update:
The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff! -
I don't store any files on my computer, I store them on a hd. Can I restore docs from my hard drive if they were backed up using time machine? And will it restore if the hd isn't even there? Like what if it got stolen or destroyed.
ehphotograph wrote:
Can I restore docs from my hard drive if they were backed up using time machine?
Yes.
And will it restore if the hd isn't even there? Like what if it got stolen or destroyed.
Also yes.
Directly-connected external drives (ie, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt) are not backed-up by default. You must remove them from the exclusion list in Time Machine Preferences > Options to get them backed-up. (Network drives cannot be backed-up.)
And they must be formatted for a Mac -- any variation of Mac OS Extended.
If the drive is connected, you can browse or restore normally -- just go to the folder or document in question and Enter Time Machine.
If the drive is not connected, it's a bit different. See #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Message was edited by: Pondini -
How to restore a Time machine backup and get a recovery partition?
Hi,
I'm quite confused!
I restored from a Time Machine backup and then setup boot camp (and removed that partition a while back) and now I don't have a recovery partition. (Can't enable File Vault and
bash-3.2# diskutil list /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *120.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 87.4 GB disk0s2
My new MacBook Pro didn't come with any CDs.
Apparently I need the recovery partition to reinstall Lion from the internet.
"Recovery HD offers on-disk recovery tools, allows you to restore from Time Machine backups, reinstall OS X Lion over the Internet..."
The recommended solution from Apple seems to be reinstall with your OSX 10.6 CD (which I don't have) and then upgrade to Lion (which seems like a PITA).
Info from : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649
What process should I follow to restore my recovery partition and apply the current state of the machine from a backup?
(the process should not involve anything I don't have, like USB memory sticks, Lion CDs, etc....)
Supplementary questions which are only relevant if the answer is "you can't" (which would seem to be a major bug!) :
Or is there a clever method to install a recovery partition onto an existing disk (which clearly has space for it)? I have searched for it but all the results I found have either not mentioned that it works without reinstalling but look like it's needed, or do say "reinstall".
If I install Lion to an external disk, can I boot from that and use the recovery disk assistant tool to restore the partition to my internal disk? (Which I assume I'll need to do to get FileVault to work) ?
Thanks,
MaxMaxs-MacBook-Pro:Applications max$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *120.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 87.4 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *136.2 MB disk2
1: Apple_partition_map 30.7 KB disk2s1
2: Apple_Driver_ATAPI 2.0 KB disk2s2
3: Apple_HFS Recovery Disk Assistant 136.2 MB disk2s3 -
I cannot load Maverick on my iMac HD. It reports that my HD is used for Time Machine backups and will not load to that drive. I do not use this drive for backups. I use an external 1 TB WD My Book for backups as well as Super Duper Backups. Can anyone offer advice. Thanks.
Welcome to Apple Support Communities
You have got the "Backups.backupdb" folder in the root level of your hard drive. This is the folder used by Time Machine to save backups to, and the OS X Mavericks installer thought that your hard drive is being used to store Time Machine backups
To fix this, open a Finder window, select the Go menu (on the menu bar) > Go to Folder, and type:
Then, delete "Backups.backupdb" and empty the Trash. Finally, open the Mavericks installer from the Applications folder and follow the steps -
Accidentally deleted Time Machine backups into Trash...
I messed up big time -- I moved my Time Machine backups into Trash from Finder. I've looked around online and it seems like I've really screwed myself over. I can't reformat/erase the disk because I have about 1.4 TB of other material on it and I don't have any other disk big enough to temporarily hold all these files. Is there any way to either restore or delete the backups without harming the rest of the files on the disk?
Full Details Here from Pondini....
Can't empty the trash after deleting backups via the Finder -
Time Machine dbfiles in Trash - how to recover?
You'd think it would be easy - drag them back.
Well, two hours later, its still clucking away,
'Preparing to Copy' over 12 million items and counting. Wow.
Can I actually expect this to work?
These are all my backups to May.
Thanks!TorontoDad wrote:
If the intention of the permissions is to protect the files - they were unsuccessful.
It might be useful to know how to hide such files to prevent accidental selection. Not everyone is going to have a special Time Machine drive and then another for all other backups.
True. But if you have other data on that drive, it should be in a separate partition. See #3 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum. If you do that, there will be no reason to be poking around in your backups via the Finder.
And if those are your only backups, they're at risk no matter what app you use. All disk drives fail, sooner or later. Just the other day there was a post where someone was doing a full restore from their TimeMachine backups. It was nearly done when BAM! the external drive failed. (Murphy was an optimist.)
So yes, consider Mozy or the like; and/or a separate external HD, perhaps with a full
bootable clone" updated at least weekly via CarbonCopyCloner (which I use) or SuperDuper; even CDs/DVDs (which I also use); +*in addition*+ to Time Machine. -
Leopard Server Time Machine Questions
We've been running Time Machine to backup client data for about 20 users for a number of months. We've set this up with Time Machine saving to a 750GB RAID 1 external drive mounted as a share point. Each user has a maximum disk quota on the share point (set up using 'edquota'). We now have some questions about how Time Machine is supposed to work:
1) We're starting to get errors that Time Machine has run out of space for individual users. We understood that Time Machine would simply delete the oldest backups and then continue (as it does with standard Time Machine on an individual Mac) but this doesn't seem to happen. Instead we get a warning that there isn't enough space. Is this correct for Server-based Time Machine or is there something we can/should do to make Time Machine behave 'normally' and auto-delete oldest backups to make space for new backups?
2) We've used 'edquota', 'quotacheck' and 'repquota' commands to create our user quotas on a share point. However we can't find any way of removing an individual user's quota completely - it seems we can change their quota but we can't remove them and start again without removing the user completely from the server. Is there any way of resetting and/or removing a user's disk quota on a share point, including clearing down all their data? For example, we have one user that has 3GB of 10GB quota 'in use' even when all their data has been removed manually. There are no hidden folders/files etc. but 'quotacheck says they are still using 3GB!
3) We have an HP Ultrium 960 LTO-3 SCSI tape drive. Does anyone know how we can backup our Time Machine data onto these tapes for off-site archives? We've looked at EMC Retrospect 8.1 but this doesn't seem to work properly with Time Machine data (and seems to be generally flakey!). Does anyone know of general OS X/Unix drivers for this type of device that would allow us to use Unix commands ('tar' etc.). Alternatively can anyone recommend a backup software solution that actually works with Time Machine data?
4) Can anyone recommend a known working solution to keeping long term archives of Time Machine data?
Thanks for any help!Thanks for a quick response!
We only backup selected client data, excluding system, apps, music, photos etc. i.e. only company data not personal data or general system data (our client systems are built from a common standard build brick). So 10GB-25GB is fine for many months of Time Machine backups for our user population.
We like Time Machine because the user doesn't have to do anything for backing up, it works automatically and the user can recover their 'oops' files without tech support help. So we're keen to get the benefits of Time Machine for several months of immediate backups that users can deal with themselves, but also we'd like some kind of longer term off-site archive capability - this is why we'd like to tape the Time Machine data.
We don't have a working tape solution at present. We have an old Retrospect 6 licence which explicitly does nothing (but complain!) with Time Machine data. We tried a trial licence of Retrospect 8.1 but it seems flakey in general and did not cope reliably with Time Machine data. We wondered about Bru but we'd have to remove Retrospect 6 (which we're keeping in case we need to recover from old archive tapes).
Currently our server is backed up using a combination of techniques:
1) Time Machine of the server itself (system and data)
2) Time Machine of the company data share point onto an external 750GB RAID 1 drive (2 active disks mirrored + 1 spare disk)
3) Weekly 'breaking' of RAID 1 mirror using a spare drive (i.e. weekly rotation of mirror drive)
4) Weekly clones of server system material (but not data) onto FireWire external drive
5) Monthly clone of RAID 1 onto another external FireWire drive (we intend to rotate this with another identical drive)
Can you confirm the situation regarding Time Machine when it runs out of space - how do we get it to 'roll over' old backup data?
Thanks again -
Using a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups and as a data drive
Hi There....can I use my Apple Time Capsule for my Time Machine backups and as a drive I can put data on?
Yes, you can use your time capsule as a drive for data. If you create a disk image, you reserve a certain amount of space for that image. Time Machine will respect that space and leave the disk image alone even if there is a large amount of unused space on the image.
If you create a folder, it starts with zero space until you add data to it. The folder can be as large as you would like as long as the space is available on the TC.
So, each has an advantage. The disk image will reserve the space until you fill it up and the folder will not. But, the folder can be as large as you would like as long as the TC has space available.
Your next question might be can you change the size of a disk image after it has been created? I haven't tried this, but think you probably could.
For most users, I think the folder concept is probably simpler for them to use and easier to understand. But more advanced users may favor the disk image concept if they feel that space will be at a premium on the disk. -
Help Incomplete Time Machine Backup and I can't set ownership options
Two days ago my iMac HD stopped working and I decided it was time to upgrade my machine so I purchased a new iMac with Mavericks installed. I seem to only have a partial Time Machine Backup located on my NAS drive, so I read various threads about how to manually retrieve files from the .inprogress file. I was able to browse the package contents and when I navigated to Macintosh HD the folder was greyed out and when I attempt to open the folder it looks empty. When I select get info the Macintosh HD folder shows almost 80GB and over 160,000 files inside. I tried copying the folder onto the desktop which failed and also onto an external drive formatted the same way as the NAS - Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Case Sensitive). Everytime I try it says something along the lines of me not having the ownership rights to copy the file over.
I tried going to the NAS drive and the mounted sparsefile and couldn't figure out how to get the ignore ownership on this volume option. When I go to Disk Utility it says Owners Enabled Yes, I can't figure out how to turn that off to let me copy the file over. I tried some recommendations about creating an Alias to Macintosh HD and also setting up Automator actions Get Selected Finder Items > Get Folder Contents > Open Finder Items > Copy Finder Items (to desktop or external drive) both of these failed.
I also don't understand why I can't view the files inside the greyed out Macintosh HD as get info shows many files inside. The sharing and permissions already says everyone can read. Is there anyway I can recover some of the files? It would be so great!
Thanks for helping me.I solved the problem and I hope this solution can help others with incomplete Time Machine Backups.
1. I made sure hidden files were shown by pasting the following line into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true ; killall Finder
2. On NAS drive I have a folder called Time Machine Backup and inside that folder it lists the different users with Time Machine Backups. I double clicked the user with the incomplete time machine backup to mount it.
3. Once mounted there should be a folder called backups.backupdb > machine name > dateandtime.inprogress. I right click that .inprogress file and selected show package contents. This lead to another folder randomly named with numbers and text. Inside that folder you should see a greyed out Macintosh HD folder. The date of the greyed out Macintosh HD folder might read something like January 24th, 1984. This appears to be the date that the Macintosh 128k was first introduced. I read on another thread that the creation date of the folder is incorrectly set after a crash resulting in the greyed out folder.
4. Due to the NAS having ownership issues I was not able to drag either the greyed out Macintosh HD or the folder above it to an external drive or the desktop of my new computer. Automator didn't work either. Here is what did work: I trashed the folder with the greyed out Macintosh HD inside from the NAS and dragged it from the trash onto my desktop. The move took a few hours to complete and the files were now all successfully on the new computer.
5. Once on the desktop the Macintosh HD folder was still greyed out. The solution was to select in the finder: View > Show Path Bar, then search for any file you remember inside your backup. For example I searched the word download and files inside the greyed out Macintosh HD folder showed up. Left clicking the file confirmed the path, that it was from the greyed out Macintosh HD folder. Now you can simply right click one of the folders in the Path Bar and open in new tab if you have Mavericks. I still couldn't directly open the Macintosh HD folder in a new tab, but I could open any of the subfolders inside in a new tab, including the users which lets you access all the backup files. I tested in Mountain Lion that you can also choose Open in Enclosing Folder by right clicking the file that you searched for or right clicking the folder in the bottom of the Path Bar.
6. Once I was done organizing backup files, I turned off hidden files by pasting this line into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false ; killall Finder
This took me days to figure out how to make use of an .inprogress file and greyed out Macintosh HD folder.
Hope this helps!!! -
Recover files with no Time Machine Backup and disk 'can't be repaired'
My Macbook Air (Mac OS X 10.7.4) was acting funny for a few days (crashing Safari, crashing Mozilla, crashing other third party software, requiring reboot, etc.). When I tried to reboot it, a loading bar and a rotating wheel came, but got switched off. It happened every time I tried. I got into Recovery mode (by pressing Command + R) to fix the disk. The disk could not be fixed. I tried reinstalling MacOSX, but it is not showing any disk to reinstall the OS in. I do not have Time Machine On.
I have some really important pictures and documents in the Mac. I want to save these files before I erase the whole disk. Any advice?
Thank you!
TL;DR
Mac dies while booting
Disk can not be fixed
Shows no disk to reinstall the MacOSX in
Never switched on the Time Machine
Want to save important files before deleting whole diskOne of the data recovery apps needs to be run on the disk. You have some options, none good:
• Take your Mac to an AppleStore (make a reservation at: http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/), or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (start here to find one: https://locate.apple.com/country). They won't run the recovery, but can tell if the drive is physically damaged. If so, and your Mac is under a year old, or covered by AppleCare, you won't have to pay for the replacement, but be sure to get the old drive back. It can then be put into an enclosure, making it an external HD for use with one of the other options:
• Take your Mac (or the drive) to a recovery service. They'll charge a large fee, and return an external HD with whavever data they can recover. You'd then need to erase the internal HD, install OSX, and try to reassembe your data from the external.
• Do it yourself. Buy an external HD (better, get two: one 3-4 times the size of the data on your Mac) and do it yourself. You'll install OSX on it and run from it to recover whatever data you can to the other external:
Start from the Recovery HD and format them both for a Mac (even if they say Mac Ready). See #1 in Using Disk Utility if you're not sure how to do that.
Then install OSX on one of them. When your Mac restarts, it will start from the external, and you'll set up a user account, etc, just as with a new Mac. When it starts again, you'll be running from a "bare-bones" system on the external HD.
Get one of the data recovery apps, install it on the external, and follow it's instructions to try to recover your stuff to the other external. As noted in the yellow box in the link above, you may get a lot of the orginal folder structure back, so you can just drag things to the proper location on the external you're running from. But you may find some or many files with partial names, perhaps numbers, etc. Some may have extensions you can identify (such as .png or .jpg), some may not. Try to open them and see what they are.
If you don't recover a lot, and are willing to spend yet more $$, you might try a different recovery app -- often one will recover things a different one can't.
When you've gotten everything you can off the internal HD, reformat it, then "clone" the external OSX drive to it and restart from the internal.
Then start making regular backups. If you want to use Time Machine, erase and use the one thats 3-4 times the size of the data it's backing up.
Also make periodic "secondary" backups to the other drive. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question
#27 for an explanation and some suggestions. -
I backed up my iMac with a "WD My Passport" using the Time Machine option and tried to restore my iMac but it only saved my applications none of my documents, photos nothing else! What happened?
There should be two sparse bundles on the TC, one for each Mac. If you click the TC in a Finder sidebar, you should see something like this (in Column View):
If you see the sparse bundle for the iMac there, but not on the window where you do a full system restore (after starting from your Recovery HD or OSX Install disc), they may be corrupted (especially if your iMac was failing at the time of the last backup).
Try repairing those backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.
Then try the full restore again, per Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14. Note that if you suspect problems on the most recent backup, you might want to select an earlier one. -
I just backed up my mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine. What would happen if I turn Time Machine off and then plug the external hard drive back into my computer?
What I am ultimately wanting to do is make more room on my computer by backing up all of my files onto the external hard drive and then deleting them off of my computer. However, neededing to be able to retrieve them from the external hard drive later down the road.
From what I have read and am trying to understand, is that I probably shouldn't have used time machine. I need to use the external hard drive like a basic flash drive where I can put things on and get things off without having it automatically update through time machine everytime I connect it to my computer.
Not tech savvy at all and barely understand basics. I need very simple and easy to understand explanations.sydababy wrote:
and then deleting them off of my computer.
BIG BIG MISTAKE ..... youre making a linchpin deathtrap for your data trying to shove everything on a single fragile HD.
Dont suffer the tragedy other people make, buy another or 2 more HD, theyre cheap as dust.
The number of people who have experienced terror by having a single external HD backup is enormous. One failure that WILL HAPPEN, and kaput,......all gone!
Dont do it, its all about redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
follow here:
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
Deleting them off your computer is fine....having only ONE copy is extremely BAD.
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.
Maybe you are looking for
-
How can I email several pdf files in one email?
HOw can I email several pdf files in one email?
-
How do I find which of the later versions of OS-X will run on my 24" iMac?
Am currently running OS_X 10.6.8 and really need to upgrade that on my 24" iMac if at all possible to run Quickbooks as I can't find an older copy of QB that will run on this system. Anyone know where to buy older versions of Quickbooks?
-
Tried all suggested solutions, erased all bad podcasts,unsubscribed from all stations,erased app reinstalled,did not sync, and downloaded all from scratch to no avail. Please help! I don't mind ( will be very happy)to go back to the old ios 6, I HATE
-
Can't install Data Guard using DBCA in Oracle 11g Release 2
I have installed Oracle database 11g Release 2 successfully. I have installed Label Security using DBCA, now when I am installing Database Vault using DBCA, it gives message "ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied" and exists back to DBCA
-
Track other things in iCloud. Not just your Apple device.
Tracking other things in iCloud than your Apple product. I think Apple should make a product to put wherever you like, so that you can find f.ex. you wallet if it´s missing. Any possibility?