How to repair messed-up folder ownership in Time Machine ?

Question

Hi everyone,
I just reformated the MacBook hard drive using Extended HFS+, journaled partition to get rid of the case-sensitiveness, which is incompatible with just ONE of my softwares. As such, TM partition is formatted as Extended HFS+, journaled and case-sensitive.
I then created a temporary administrator to set everything up (Updates and such), then a second administrator (which is the one I'm using everyday). I didn't activate Time Machine backups, as I wanted to restore everything first, just in case something may go wrong.
As this is my primary work machine, I wanted to restore the "Documents" subfolder first, but Time Machine popped out a dialog saying that I wouldn't be able to see the files newly restored, because I don't have permissions to read and write them.
Indeed, I checked directly in the Time Machine tree on the external hard drive with Apple+I keys, and 'cubytus' was not listed in the permissions.
As far as I remember, I checked ownership in the Terminal, and wanted to change it using the commands:
sudo su -
[----Now I type my identifiers, and I'm in root mode; I then navigate to the Documents folder in the Time Machine tree I want to restore.---]
chown -Rv cubytus Documents
The last line is supposed to change every document ownership below this directory to replace it by cubytus instead of Admin2, as well as report every operation performed (I like having some feedback).
Turns out that every verbose line ends in "Permisison denied"....
I can add up the current admin in addition to the original one for each document, but it's very impractical since I have thousands of small files. Changing ownership is still the way to go.
Am I doing something wrong? Thanks for help
Oh, btw..I tried the Disk Utility pemrission repair thing, but it didn't found any problem on the Time Machine partition.
Message was edited by: cubytus
Message was edited by: cubytus

Answer 1

cubytus wrote:
Hi everyone,
I just reformated the MacBook hard drive using Extended HFS+, journaled partition to get rid of the case-sensitiveness, which is incompatible with just ONE of my softwares. As such, TM partition is formatted as Extended HFS+, journaled and case-sensitive.
This mis-match is likely to cause trouble in the future. If you have, for example, two files named "FileA" and "filea" in the same folder on the TM drive, and try to restore them to your case-ignorant HD, TM is going to have a problem. I've never tried it, so I can't tell you whether it will overlay the first one it restores with the second, or crash, or what, but it can't be done.
And you may have some of these without realizing it -- if you ever changed a capital to lower-case, or vice-versa, after a file's initial backup, it's a possibility.
Indeed, I checked directly in the Time Machine tree on the external hard drive with Apple+I keys, and 'cubytus' was not listed in the permissions.
No, TM automatically denies everything to everybody, among other things, in it's backups, to keep us mere mortals from messing with them. The original file permissions are kept separately, and TM should restore them along with the files, as they were.
What you're probably seeing is, the user that you're signed-on as won't have those permissions, once TM restores the files. I'd suggest trying the same procedure as your other, or original user -- see if you get the same message.