How to access a TimeMachine Backup (non sparse bundle)

I have a TM backup on a QNAP device. What I see is a folder with the computer name. The next level is a folder bands and two files - Info.plist and Info.backup.
Neither TimeMachine nor the Migration Tool recognizes the backup. The backuped computer was accidently erased.
I'm desperately looking for a solution!

That IS a sparse bundle disk image.
The data (including the normal directory structure) is spread over a huge number of 8 MB "band" files.
See the pink box in How Time Machine works its Magic for details. It shows one on a Time Capsule; the setup is the same on a NAS like your QNAP, but of course some of the names will be different.
As noted there, if you can mount and open the disk image inside the sparse bundle, you'll see your backups, as in the green box in the same link.
But if it's damaged, double-clicking it won't open it -- instead (after a few moments) you'll get an error message -- no recognizable file system, or unavailable, or the like. I don't think there are any data recovery tools that can examine the bands and extract data files from them.

Similar Messages

Cannot access old TimeMachine backups

Hi there,
I'm new to this forum, and have been using a MacBook Pro for several years so am comfortable with the OS but not an expert. Hence my question that I am about to post to this forum in the hope that someone can steer me in the right direction please.
My wife and I both use MBPs; 7 months ago we bought a NAS and started using TimeMachine for the first time. The backups have been running all this time, and we have both been able to access our own backups without any issues at all. Recently my wife's machine crashed and it needed to be repaired, this included formatting the C: to remove all the old junk that was on there and allow her to start with a fresh new OS install.
I wasn't worried about recovering her data because we had TM running and was hoping to recover certain files from there. I tried to use the Option Key and click on 'Browse other backup disks' and it shows her old backup on our NAS, however when I select it then it takes me straight to the current drive of the computer I'm on (in the Star Wars view) - not the backup as expected. I have tried this from her MBP and also from mine with the same results - it always seem to go to Star Wars for the current machine.
I'm wondering if the problem was that both of the Time Machines MBPs used the same NAS user account to access the NAS folder to make the backups? Should I have used different user accounts?
Basically, I have her sparsebundle file on my NAS and I really need to access it however I cannot find a way. Can you please help me with this? Hours of Googling has revealed that everyone else used the Option Key 'Browse other backup disks' method however as I have described that doesn't seem to be working for me.
We are both on Mavericks (since we started with Time Machine) and have not upgraded to Yosemite yet (if that is any useful info).
I would be really grateful if you could offer some help with this please.
Cheers,
Adrian.

chucma
you craft a question as if an old hand... I have asked our Gracious Hosts to move your question - likely to MBPro, but possibly Mavericks or TimeMachine.
A good trick to get the question posted in the right place is to navigate to the forum first. The SiteWare seems more comfortable with offering the forum you are in in the that final step.
this may be helpful in seeking the forum you really want - SITEMAP | Apple Support Communities - this is a VERY special creation of our friend turingtest2. I make use of these as browser bookmarks:
You may find these links to your own content useful, the first three will highlight threads with new activity:
Authored Discussions
Participated Discussions
Following Discussions
Recently Viewed Discussions
best regards
ÇÇÇ

How to access Time Machine backups after using migration assistant?

Can someone please help me with a TM issue.
My HD died so I fitted a new one. I figured that I would do a clean install rather than use TM to bring across a whole bunch of 5 year old junk and Aps that all broke after the Leopard -Snow Leopard -Lion -Mountain Lion upgrades.
Installed 10.8.2 Mountain Lion, no issues. Then used TM to drag and drop all the Applications I actually wanted, still good. Then used Migration assistant to bring in the remainder of the settings, documents, mail etc. For some reason you cannot migrate to the current default user so you have to create a new user profile which I did. New profile was great so I deleted the other profile created at install that was pretty much blank.
At this stage everything looks awesome but I noticed a video clip was missing in a Final Cut project so I went back into TM to retrieve it. Now, all the documents in my old user profile in TM have a little no entry symbol on them and I do not have permission to look at those files.
It looks as though I am now being treated as someone else on a different machine and no doubt TM will continue to work from this point on but how do I tell it that there is just one user on this machine and I want access to all the historic backups too?
Any advice will be gratefully received.

Many thanks for your response Mende,
I am trying to specifically NOT do a full TM restore because I have some issues with some programs that I cannot delete. I wanted a fresh start but from what I understand the TM will bring back everything as it was, including all the corrupt system files. Fixing the TM permissions would be the preferable option.
(I attempted to make a windows partition on my system once, thinking it would make some sort of clever fake-windows desktop supported by Mac coding. It actually wanted me to do a full windows 7 install on the partition with windows install disks so I cancelled the process. Because it was a partial install I have not been able to uninstall the modifications and my system was crashing regularly due to some sort of stray code).
Just out of interest, if your OSX install is perfectly good, will TM use that or will it still take your OSX from the TM backup?
Apart from that one stray file, my system is now super clean and faster than ever... but maybe there are still some things missing that I haven't noticed yet.

How to Access time capsule backup data on Airport Extreme

Hi All,
Thank you in advance.
The Problem : One of our Mac Book Air was stolen and we have the MBA backed up on Airport Extreme.
Currently we don't have another MBA that can do a full restore. I just want to access the Airport Extreme Time Capsule Data and get few files that is in the backups.
I have been searching for a solution and still can't find a way to do this. It is just 1 set of files inside the backup.
Thank you again for all the help.
G

Hi LaPastenague
I went over the pondini.org website, however still I can't access other users data T
I can go and review my own data.
The Data is backed up ( shared ) on Time Capsule ( which means all the users in the same house uses this one single time capsule to backup )
http://www.apple.com/airport-time-capsule/
## We currently don't know what was the username or password the user was using.
I am also looking at the pondini.org and
"With Accounts: this allows setting up separate accounts, each with its own password and folder. You can set up accounts and passwords that correspond to the ones on your Mac (but passwords must be changed separately), and/or you can create different ones. Each account may have permission to Read, or Read and Write, or Not allowed. This is not recommended for use with Time Machine backups, as no single user can see everything on the disk(s). That's especially important if there's a space problem -- you'd have to connect with each account in turn to see the whole picture. The backups for each Mac are protected by the usual permissions anyway, so in most cases this option is overkill. There are also a few minor differences in the content of some of the windows when selecting the backup destinations"
We are usuing this "With Accounts" settings

How to repair a TimeMachine Backup file

I'm trying to use Migration Assistant to copy data and user info to a new MacBook Pro (10.9.4). I created a fresh Time Machine backup file of the source iMac on a USB drive connected to my Airport Extreme. Unfortunately, MA says 'No Volumes Found' in the Time Machine backup file when I try to move the data to the new MacBook Pro.
So now, I'm trying to attach the Time Machine backup file to attempt to manually repair with the fsck_hfs. I've mounted the backup hard drive to my Mac - the drive is called 'Apple Network HD'. The Time Machine back file is called 'Upstairs iMac'. The Info detail for the file is shown below.
I type the following in Terminal root:
hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify -noautofsck /Volumes/Apple-Network-HD/Upstairs-iMac.sparsebundle
The following is returned:
hdiutil: attach failed - No such file or directory
I am new to terminal commands but I can not figure out why I am unable to point hdiutil to the correct file. Any help would be appreciated? Thanks.

HT1170.html Airport capsule cannot be found error - in Apple Support.
They have a number of support articles on problems with Mavericks

How do I fix this error message - "sparse bundle is already in use"

Lately, I have been getting the following message that says:
The backup disk image “/Volumes/Kaminski Family Time Capsul/Keith (2).sparsebundle” is already in use.
How might I fix this? Thank you for your time.

Unplug the power cord from the back of the Time Capsule
Count to ten
Plug the power cord back into the back of the Time Capsule
This will fix this issue 98% of the time. If you are in the unlucky 2%, more help is here:
The Backup disk image ... sparsebundle ... is already in use.

I'm doing a timemachine backup of my current MBPro. The MBPro has aproximately 250 GB of content that is being "timemachine'd". My new SSD is only 128 GB, how do I restore the timemachine backup, when my old drive was larger than the new drive?

I'm doing a timemachine backup of my current MBPro. The MBPro has aproximately 250 GB of content that is being "timemachine'd". My new SSD is only 128 GB, how do I restore the timemachine backup, when my old drive was larger than the new drive? Is there a way to pick what you want to restore or am I completely f***ed? I tried googling the answer but all i got was how to move the timemachine backup to another HDD. Sorry for the ******** question, thought I'd try here.
Thanks for the help.

I'm doing a timemachine backup of my current MBPro. The MBPro has aproximately 250 GB of content that is being "timemachine'd". My new SSD is only 128 GB, how do I restore the timemachine backup, when my old drive was larger than the new drive? Is there a way to pick what you want to restore or am I completely f***ed? I tried googling the answer but all i got was how to move the timemachine backup to another HDD. Sorry for the ******** question, thought I'd try here.
Thanks for the help.

Access to Resources via Non-admin accounts

Is there any way to provide access to resources so that they are accessible via
non-admin accounts. For e.g. to Retrieve my JMSConnectionfactory i do a
Environment env = new Environment();
env.setProviderUrl(url);
env.setSecurityPrincipal(username);
env.setSecurityCredentials(password);
Context ctx = env.getInitialContext();
The username and password here is the admin account. This works fine but if i
use a non-admin account(member of Operators group), i get exceptions on Domainloghandler
runtime
Problem: I need to register a mbean that needs to access JMS Resources. Since
our deployment team doesnt want to provide us access to admin accounts, we use
a "operators" group account to register our mbeans. if i do this, i get a
Access not Allowed for subject:principals=[operator, Operators], on ResourceType:
DomainLogHandlerRuntime Action: execute Target: registerToMe.
This happens when my managed resource tries to access a JMS ConnectionFactory.
Instead if i register my mbeans using the admin account, everything is fine and
my managed resource works nice.
This is on weblogic 81 SP1 on Solaris. Please let me know if you need more details.
Any clues/hints/solutions greatly appreciated. There is not a lot of documentation
on how to access/register mbeans using non-admin accounts.
TIA
Raj

I have done some more debugging on this and have narrowed down the issue to the
location where my initialcontext is being obtained.
so if i register my mbean as a non-admin account and do an operation on the managed
resource which fetches initial context, i get the below exception. This is how
i get my initialcontext
weblogic.jndi.Environment env = new weblogic.jndi.Environment();
env.setProviderURL("t3://machine:8102,machine:8103");
env.setSecurityPrincipal("operator");
env.setSecurityCredentials("operator");
Context ctx = env.getInitialContext();
I am doing this from a mbean thats registered on a different managed server(t3://machine:8101)...
Whats wrong with this?
TIA
Raj
"Raj" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
Is there any way to provide access to resources so that they are accessible
via
non-admin accounts. For e.g. to Retrieve my JMSConnectionfactory i do
a
Environment env = new Environment();
env.setProviderUrl(url);
env.setSecurityPrincipal(username);
env.setSecurityCredentials(password);
Context ctx = env.getInitialContext();
The username and password here is the admin account. This works fine
but if i
use a non-admin account(member of Operators group), i get exceptions
on Domainloghandler
runtime
Problem: I need to register a mbean that needs to access JMS Resources.
Since
our deployment team doesnt want to provide us access to admin accounts,
we use
a "operators" group account to register our mbeans. if i do this, i get
a
Access not Allowed for subject:principals=[operator, Operators], on ResourceType:
DomainLogHandlerRuntime Action: execute Target: registerToMe.
This happens when my managed resource tries to access a JMS ConnectionFactory.
Instead if i register my mbeans using the admin account, everything is
fine and
my managed resource works nice.
This is on weblogic 81 SP1 on Solaris. Please let me know if you need
more details.
Any clues/hints/solutions greatly appreciated. There is not a lot of
documentation
on how to access/register mbeans using non-admin accounts.
TIA
Raj

Why is the sparse bundle so much smaller than the backed up computer...can I be confident all files are backed up?

Hey gang,
iphoto folder became big so I have moved it to an external drive. I made sure the external disk is not excluded from timemachine backup in tm preferences. Backup seemed to take forever (it actually said "preparing for backup" the whole time with a spinning progress bar) ie 24 hours and still the same pogress bar.
i stopped the process as i had no confidence anything was actually happening
When i open up time machine, an earlier version of my imac is there, but the external drive is kind of greyed and i cannot access it.
When I check the sparse bundle size, it is under 200 gb, when my imac is around 600 gb, 900 with the external drive.
Why is the sparse bundle so small relative to the imac? are there hidden data files outside of the sparse bundle? when checking the preferences, it states total included is 921 gb...yet that is not reflected in the sparse bundle size.
I want to be sure iphoto is actually backed up before deleting it from my imac.
thanks anyone!

marten berkman wrote:
I am wondering whether the "processing" progress bar was due to the time capsule freeing up space for the additional data on the new external drive. When I cancelled it, available space on the tc incresed from 200 to 500 gb.
Yes, quite possibly. Especially on Leopard and Snow Leopard, that process on network backups is excruciatingly repetitive and slow. It's improved greatly in Lion and later, but still isn't exactly quick.
The backup complete, i checked the contents of the backed up version of the external drive, and the iphoto folder was the same size as original, so I have confidence that iphoto is backed up. Now I could delete the iphoto from the imac, freeing up tons of space.
Yay!
Still curious why the imac sparsebundle is only 160gb, while my macbook pro sparsebundle is about 700 gb...as though they are inversely named from the computers they back up.
Oh, I didn't realize you had two Macs backing-up to the TC. Which one is the external HD connected to?
Unless you've specifically excluded things, after the initial backup, the sparse bundle should be nearly the size of the data it's backing-up (TM does exclude some things like system work files, most caches and logs, and trash, so the backups are a few GBs smaller). As you do more backups, of course, it will grow.
So please clarify how much data is on each drive, Mac, and sparse bundle.
Also, the 2tb time capsule has 258 gb of 1.8 tb available....am I to suppose that there is hidden backup data not in the sparse bundles?
Sparse bundles are odd critters. They don't automatically shrink when things are deleted from them. Instead, the vacated space is used for new files until it's full, then it begins to grow again. Time Machine will "compact" them when necessary, to reclaim the empty space, but doesn't take the time to do it unless it's out of room.
You can do that manually if you want, per the pink box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12.
Message was edited by: Pondini

How to copy a networked TimeMachine backup to a USB drive and restore from it?

Hi,
I backup my MacBook Air with TimeMachine to my QNAP NAS which offers a TimeMachine backup service and I can restore data from it OK.
Working in IT, and being a bit paranoid about important data loss, I am concerned that if I was robbed or my house burnt down I would most likely lose both the MacBook and the TimeMachine Backup on my NAS :-(
To protect against this I have backup my (linux based) NAS to an external drive that I keep offsite. This drive is encrypted to keep my data secure with a Linux form of encryption (cryptsetup) and hence can't be plugged into a MacBook to try and restore from it - I doubt this would work either as the TimeMachine data is not located in the root of the drive.
So what I have done to test my restore process is to mount the encrypted NAS backup that include the TimeMachine backup folders on a Linux machine and then copy the TimeMachine data to the root of an HFS+ formatted external USB drive.
But, now I am stuck as how to try and restore something from this to my MacBook to see if the copy of the TimeMachine backup is good. If I press the Alt key on the TimeMachine icon, I can select an alternate backup device and when I enter TimeMachine to browse the data, I can browse the structure but there is no option to go back in time !! It seems like it is not possible to restore from this copy of the TimeMachine backup.
Does anyone know if this should be possible, and if so, what am I doing wrong here?
Rgds
Gary

For anyone else that may be in a similar situation, I can confirm that this does actually work.
I am unsure why I was not able to mount the original sparseimage that I copied to the USB drive before, but I have gone through the entire process again and I could successfully mount the TM sparseimage onto my MacBook and restore files from within it using TimeMachine to my Mac.
This is a Disaster Recovery solution only needed for if both my NAS and Macbook get stolen or damaged so I am happy with this solution for now.
I will try the restore process several more times from my monthly backups to reassure myself that the first failure to mount the sparse image was an anomaly.
This is the process that I have tested:
Configure MacBook to backup to TimeMachine Service running on QNAP NAS device.
Perform regular backup of QNAP NAS Device (Linux) including the TimeMachine backup data to an external USB drive with encryption enabled and store this device safely off-site
In time of loss of both NAS and MacBook, Time Machine data can be recovered to another Mac without the need of the NAS using the following process:
Mount the external drive containing the backup of the NAS filesystem (ext4) which is encrypted onto a Linux host so it is readable - use the cryptsetup luksOpen options to access the encrypted filesystem then mount it.
Mount a n empty HFS+ formatted USB drive on the Linux host
Use Rsync to copy the sparsebundle from the external NAS drive backup disk to the root of the USB Drive
Insert the HFS+ formatted USB containing the sparesbundle into the Mac's USB port
Double click the sparsebundle to mount it onto the Mac as a Volume
Using Alt button and the TimeMachine icon, select use alternative backup disk and you should see the TM backup in the sparsebundle
Enter TimeMachine and you should be able to restore any/all files
Hope that helps someone else and thanks to LaPastenague for pointing me in the direction of some of the answers I needed.
Rgds
Gary

HT2966 I changed a repeating event and this ****** DELETED 10 events. How to restore this from timemachine backup?

On the iPhone you can change how many times an event is repeated. I changed that number from 10 to 11 and it automatically deleted all my 10 events and replaced the valuable notes with *nothing*.
I do daily backups with timemachine, but cant seem to find a way to restore the events - since I already made a lot of changes today.
next question: is there an ical alternative, which is actually safe to use for business?

For anyone else that may be in a similar situation, I can confirm that this does actually work.
I am unsure why I was not able to mount the original sparseimage that I copied to the USB drive before, but I have gone through the entire process again and I could successfully mount the TM sparseimage onto my MacBook and restore files from within it using TimeMachine to my Mac.
This is a Disaster Recovery solution only needed for if both my NAS and Macbook get stolen or damaged so I am happy with this solution for now.
I will try the restore process several more times from my monthly backups to reassure myself that the first failure to mount the sparse image was an anomaly.
This is the process that I have tested:
Configure MacBook to backup to TimeMachine Service running on QNAP NAS device.
Perform regular backup of QNAP NAS Device (Linux) including the TimeMachine backup data to an external USB drive with encryption enabled and store this device safely off-site
In time of loss of both NAS and MacBook, Time Machine data can be recovered to another Mac without the need of the NAS using the following process:
Mount the external drive containing the backup of the NAS filesystem (ext4) which is encrypted onto a Linux host so it is readable - use the cryptsetup luksOpen options to access the encrypted filesystem then mount it.
Mount a n empty HFS+ formatted USB drive on the Linux host
Use Rsync to copy the sparsebundle from the external NAS drive backup disk to the root of the USB Drive
Insert the HFS+ formatted USB containing the sparesbundle into the Mac's USB port
Double click the sparsebundle to mount it onto the Mac as a Volume
Using Alt button and the TimeMachine icon, select use alternative backup disk and you should see the TM backup in the sparsebundle
Enter TimeMachine and you should be able to restore any/all files
Hope that helps someone else and thanks to LaPastenague for pointing me in the direction of some of the answers I needed.
Rgds
Gary

How to access a single file folder in timemachine using another computer as my own was stolen?

Help!
My Macbook Pro was stolen!
I made backups with timemachine. But now there is no other Mac in the area to access this, and a windows computer does not read it. I am also nowhere near an Apple store.
Possibly next week, via a colleague, I will have access to another Macbook. How do I find and restore then the single file folder in the timemachine backup. which has all work related documents, onto the desktop of this other computer, so that I can then transfer it via USB stick to a windows operated desktop computer?
Thanks for any tips!

No, there's no good way to do this. You *could* (if you can run an .exe file off the flash drive) try the Flash Projector, if you can run the SWF as a standalone application.
Adobe Flash Player - Downloads

How to copy a networked TimeMachine backup to an external drive and restore from it?

Hi,
I backup my MacBook Air with TimeMachine to my QNAP NAS which offers a TimeMachine backup service and I can restore data from it OK.
Working in IT, and being a bit paranoid about important data loss, I am concerned that if I was robbed or my house burnt down I would most likely lose both the MacBook and the TimeMachine Backup on my NAS :-(
To protect against this I have backup my (linux based) NAS to an external drive that I keep offsite. This drive is encrypted to keep my data secure with a Linux form of encryption (cryptsetup) and hence can't be plugged into a MacBook to try and restore from it - I doubt this would work either as the TimeMachine data is not located in the root of the drive.
So what I have done to test my restore process is to mount the encrypted NAS backup that include the TimeMachine backup folders on a Linux machine and then copy the TimeMachine data to the root of an HFS+ formatted external USB drive.
But, now I am stuck as how to try and restore something from this to my MacBook to see if the copy of the TimeMachine backup is good. If I press the Alt key on the TimeMachine icon, I can select an alternate backup device and when I enter TimeMachine to browse the data, I can browse the structure but there is no option to go back in time !! It seems like it is not possible to restore from this copy of the TimeMachine backup.
Does anyone know if this should be possible, and if so, what am I doing wrong here?
Rgds
Gary

Try un-mounting the drive from the Linux computer and see if you can access it as NAS.

How do I access old iCloud backups?

Hi,
This forum interface is not exactly user intuitive, so I apologize beforehand if this question has been asked hundreds of times already.
I lost my iPhone 4 near the end last year, and purchased a new iPhone 4S to replace it. After using the new iPhone for a couple of months, I've started getting notifications that my iCLoud storage is full, and that I should purchase more storage. When I enter 'Manage Backups' for iCloud, I see that I have two backups - one recent backup that is 1.5GB large, and an old backup that is 3.1GB large. This larger backup was made before I lost my phone, and therefore this is great news - it means I might get back all my old photos and whatever else might be on there. Also, if I can get back those files I want, I can delete the old backup and won't have any problems with running out of storage for a while. Therefore, some questions arise:
1. How do I actually access the old backup? I don't seem to be able to open it in the iCloud site, download it to my hard-drive, or open it with the iCloud utility for Windows. All I want to do is to see which files and materials from the old backup that I would want to salvage, and throw away the rest, but how do I do this? I do not want to overwrite my current phone settings or files, since I've been using the new phone for a few months now and have a lot of new settings, contacts, etc, that I do not want to overwrite. Mostly I'm interested in getting my photos back.
2. If it is not possible to actually access the old backups, why is this? Is there a policy that anyone knows of from Apple? I can't imagine actually buying more storage space in the cloud, as my phone keeps suggesting, if I'm not even given access to the data I back up.
Thanks a lot, and again - sorry if I've restated a question that has already been resolved here.
(I'm running a Windows 7 computer if that's relevant, and the latest iOS on my iPhone 4S)
Thanks,
Henrik

Although more recent, and with newer devices, I have been trying to find this same information. Please help!

How can I access a calendar backup from my old iPhone?

How can I access a calendar backup from my old iPhone?
I recently had to get a replacement iPhone 4. The tech at the Apple Store thought that I might have had a software problem and recommended that I not "restore from backup," but start this phone as a new device and just sync the apps and what-not. My calendar on my computer was different than the one on my old phone, though, and now I need the data from my old iPhone calendar. I did back up my old phone just prior to taking it to the Apple Store.
HELP!

Well what you can do is update to ios5 then use icloud to sync your calandar up to your phone then restore your phone as new and when prompted in the new phone setup put in your icloud username and password and you will have your calandar events back.

How to access a TimeMachine Backup (non sparse bundle)

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