Retrieving a Time Machina backup on Tiger

Question

I recently went back to Tiger from Leopard because I was sick of the problems. Anyways, I have all my music on my Time Machine backup, but I can't seem to drag and drop it to my music folder. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Just to clarify, hard links, at least at the file level, have been part of UNIX as long as I've been working with it. I haven't used them in Darwin, but I would expect they have been there all along.
You should test copying an easily readable file from your Time Machine backup to your Tiger installation (would want this to be copied to a disk other than the Time Machine backup disk) and verify it copies cleanly and you can read it.
If that works you should be able to pick a date & time (via the Time Machine folder names) and drill down and copy the desired folder back to you Tiger hard drive.
I haven't tested any of this, but based on expected UNIX behavior this should work.
Unlike soft links or aliases that are merely pointers to a file, hard links are like a duplicate directory entry that points to the same physical file location. Hard links are virtually indistinguishable from each other for a given file so it gets kind of confusing which entry corresponds to when the file was first created on the Time Machine disk. Any of the hard links you chose to copy for a given file should result in copying that file to a new location.
The UNIX ln (elle n) command is what I believe Time Machine is making extensive use of under the covers, you can learn more by typing 'man ln' in terminal. The first full back up does in fact copy everything from the user's hard drive to the Time Machine disk. From that point forward new top level folders are created for each backup, and any changed files are actually copied to the the corresponding location in that high level / datetime folder on the Time Machine disk, and unchanged files simply have a hard link created to the existing version of that file on the Time Machine disk.
Where things get kind of tough is if you have rather large files that change fairly frequently (like Virtual Machine files, or large media projects) since a new copy of those will be created each time Time Machine runs and that file has changed.
I'm still waiting for the first time that Time Machine needs to free up space on my backup disk to see what gets deleted. I'm backing up 2 Virtual machines, my OS install and a modest amount of personal data with Time Machine. I have been pretty careful about excluding directories that contain very large files that don't actually need backing up, and so far so good on Time Machine Disk space.
I'm sure there is more involved, but Time Machine seem like a clever way to leverage functionality that UNIX has had for years.