Time Machine backup corrupted

Just replaced the internal hard drive in my iMac because I thought it was failing.
Reinstalled 10.6, restored the Time Machine backup for the four users on the computer, and the symptoms have returned - spinning wheel at the startup, sometimes not finding the startup folder, sometimes long pauses between data accesses when it does startup, etc. Because there's a new hard drive inside, I'm assuming Time Machine has backed up some corrupted files that are leading to these symptoms.
My question: Is it possible to delete a couple days' worth of backups in Time Machine inside the "Backups.backupdb" folder (because the iMac was functioning well a couple days before the failure) and THEN restore?
Ron

ronlevesque wrote:
My question: Is it possible to delete a couple days' worth of backups in Time Machine inside the "Backups.backupdb" folder (because the iMac was functioning well a couple days before the failure) and THEN restore?
If William's suggestion doesn't help, much better would be to do a full system restore from an earlier backup, per #14 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

Similar Messages

Time Machine backups corrupt or external hard drive failure?

My goal today was to upgrade my MacBook Pro's HD, and to restore my system from my latest Time Machine backup which resides on an external hard drive. I installed the new hard drive, formatted it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and selected Restore System From Backup from Utilities. The system restore was five minutes form finishing when I received an error that the system restore could not be completed, and that I should restart my machine and try again. I did as instructed, but once the system restore process began, the screen went gray, and I was told that the Snow Leopard install could not be completed.
Before beginning the process a third time, I ran Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard install disc and attempted to verify and repair the external (Time Machine) hard drive. The Time Machine hard drive could not be verified, nor could it be repaired. I popped in the old hard drive into my MacBook Pro, booted Snow Leopard, and ran Disk Utility, and tried again repairing the Time Machine hard drive. Here is the log of the error I received:
2010-12-29 21:14:30 -0800: Verify and Repair volume “Time Machine”
2010-12-29 21:14:30 -0800: Starting repair tool:
2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking extents overflow file.
2010-12-29 21:14:31 -0800: Checking catalog file.
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Invalid node structure
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: The volume Time Machine could not be verified completely.
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Volume repair complete.
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800:
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Disk Utility stopped repairing “Time Machine”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Do these errors indicate that my Time Machine backups located in the Backups.backupdb are corrupt, or is the external hard drive corrupt and failing?
The Time Machine backups are on a Maxtor OneTouch, and from what I've read, they're prone to an early demise. I've also recently noticed that my Time Machine backups started slowing. For example, I would plug in my external hard drive and if 1.3GB needed to be backed up, it would stall at 300 MB before jumping to 700 MB, stall again, then jump to 900 MB. That could be a sign of a failing hard drive, correct? If the external hard drive is failing, I can purchase a new eternal hard drive then copy the Backups.backupdb to the new hard drive, correct?
However, if Backups.backupdb is corrupt, then from what I understand, I would have to start fresh. I would prefer to not start fresh unless there's no other option, as I would be losing almost three years worth of Time Machine backups.
Any guidance is appreciated. Thanks!

ali_baba7 wrote:
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Invalid node structure
2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
It's possible a heavy-duty 3rd-party utility such as +Disk Warrior+ can fix that. It's about $100, and there's no guarantee, but it's probably a good investment for the future.
Do these errors indicate that my Time Machine backups located in the Backups.backupdb are corrupt, or is the external hard drive corrupt and failing?
The structure of the file system is damaged.
That may have been caused by the disk beginning to fail, but there's no way to tell for sure until you erase and reformat the disk and try to use it.
I've also recently noticed that my Time Machine backups started slowing. For example, I would plug in my external hard drive and if 1.3GB needed to be backed up, it would stall at 300 MB before jumping to 700 MB, stall again, then jump to 900 MB. That could be a sign of a failing hard drive, correct?
It could, but it could also be whatever's wrong with the file structure.
If the external hard drive is failing, I can purchase a new eternal hard drive then copy the Backups.backupdb to the new hard drive, correct?
No. You can't copy corrupted backups. They're all linked together, like a database, so if anything's damaged, the whole set is suspect, and can't be copied.
There are a couple of options:
If the disk is physically ok, and the directory damage was recent, you might be able to restore from an earlier backup. But since you noticed problems some time ago, the damage may not be recent.
Or, you might be able to get up and running by just installing OSX from your SL Install disk (and the 10.6.5 "combo" update). You'll be missing whatever wasn't restored in that last 5 minutes or so. Things are restored in the same order they're listed by the Finder, so it will be the last things in the last user account. You should be able to figure out where it stopped, check or delete the very last file (likely incomplete) and selectively restore as many of the remaining things as you can, via the "Star Wars" display.
Just to make things more difficult, if the disk is failing, the more you use it, the more likely it is to get worse or fail completely.
So your safest bet may be to install OSX, then download and install the 10.6.5 "combo" update. Info and download available at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1324 Be sure to do a +Repair Permissions+ via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) afterwards. Then recover what you can.

Time Machine Backup Corrupted Everytime MacBook is closed.

Everytime my macbook is closed or taken with me to business meetings my time machine backup is corrupted and I have to start all over again with backups. This is obscene. On top of that I just had a hiccup with the Finder freezing and had to restart while time machine was seemingly hanging and, again, I must restart just as if I had never had time machine at all.
I am running TM to a Time Capsule.
This is unacceptable. I should be able to close my mac without fear of that corrupting the backup. I should also not have to wait for a backup to complete in order to be able to take my mac with me on business without fear of all backups vaporizing into the plane of non-existence.
Apple needs to institute some sort of checkpoint system where time machine will log its progress after certain points in its backup process. It is a bigger headache to use Time Machine than to manually backup at this point. At least with a manual backup I dont have to worry about data loss as much. Resetting Time Machine has become a daily task.
Anyone else just about fed up because of this blaring issue?

are you putting it to sleep or putting it to sleep by closing it?
Everytime i have closed my macbook while TM was running it has corrupted. we're not talking once or twice. I got the time capsule the day it came out... and have bee having this problem ever since.

How to restore a time machine backup from a corrupted disk

Hi.
I have quite a problem. I recently downgraded to os x 10.5.4 due to the requirements of Digidesign's Pro Tools. I did so with a clean install in order to have the most optimized computer possible without loads of unused data. I had backed up my data using Time Machine on an external hard-drive (LaCie, 1 TB) so I wasn't worried about losing important data.
However, when I inserted my external hard-drive after the clean installation it turns out to be corrupted in some way. It is only recognized in Disk Utility, it doesn't mount on my desktop.
Disk Utility is unable to repair the disk. The errors are:
+Verify and Repair volume “Kristoffer's back-up disk”+
+Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.+
+Invalid node structure+
+Volume check failed.+
+Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.+
I went out and bought "Data Rescue II" at once to try to recover my data. It works fine with the stuff I've manually dragged to the disc but the Time Machine backup folders seem compressed in some way (It's only about 86 MB). And when I click a file restored from one of the Time Machine folders it seems like it's just a shortcut to an "original file". I get this error when double-clicking such a file:
+The alias "filename" could not be opened, because the original item cannot be found.+
Is there some way for me to get Time Machine to understand the back up disk even though it's corrupted? Or some other way to retrieve my data?
I have TONS of extremely important data on the disk so it would cost me a huge amount of work to format the disk and start from scratch.
ANY help is greatly appreciated

ohnoono wrote:
Hi.
I have quite a problem. I recently downgraded to os x 10.5.4 due to the requirements of Digidesign's Pro Tools. I did so with a clean install in order to have the most optimized computer possible without loads of unused data. I had backed up my data using Time Machine on an external hard-drive (LaCie, 1 TB) so I wasn't worried about losing important data.
However, when I inserted my external hard-drive after the clean installation it turns out to be corrupted in some way. It is only recognized in Disk Utility, it doesn't mount on my desktop.
Disk Utility is unable to repair the disk. The errors are:
+Verify and Repair volume “Kristoffer's back-up disk”+
+Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.+
+Invalid node structure+
+Volume check failed.+
+Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.+
I went out and bought "Data Rescue II" at once to try to recover my data. It works fine with the stuff I've manually dragged to the disc but the Time Machine backup folders seem compressed in some way (It's only about 86 MB). And when I click a file restored from one of the Time Machine folders it seems like it's just a shortcut to an "original file". I get this error when double-clicking such a file:
+The alias "filename" could not be opened, because the original item cannot be found.+
Is there some way for me to get Time Machine to understand the back up disk even though it's corrupted?
no, that's quite impossible. you may try using Disk warrior on that drive. it's known to be able to fix the kind of error that DU is reporting. if that doesn't work your only hope is data recovery. If Data Rescue II doesn't work you can try other data recovery software like Filesalvage or try professional data recovery services (those can can a fortune).
Or some other way to retrieve my data?
I have TONS of extremely important data on the disk so it would cost me a huge amount of work to format the disk and start from scratch.
ANY help is greatly appreciated

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!

Time Machine backup file corrupted and locked

This morning when I switch on my Mac there was a dialogue box telling me that my Time Machine backup file was corrupted and that Time Machine would have to create a new backup file.
I am backing up my Macs to a disk connected to my Airport Extreme. It's been working for months without any problems. Other than this morning. Time Machine buddy had the following message:
+Starting standard backup+
+Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/MyBookHome+
+Mounted network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/MyBookHome+
+QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM DIRTY+
+Runtime corruption detected on /Volumes/MyBookHome/iMac27.sparsebundle (fsck_hfs -q termination status: 3)+
+Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/MyBookHome+
+Mounted network destination using URL: afp://[email protected]/MyBookHome+
+Backup verification failed for image /Volumes/MyBookHome-2/iMac27.sparsebundle!+
+Moved previous backup image to /Volumes/MyBookHome-2/iMac27_2010-11-01-032949.sparsebundle+
+Recovery backup declined by user.+
+Backup canceled.+
+Ejected Time Machine network volume.+
Has anybody seen something like this before?
I now have a locked and renamed sparsebundle on my disk and backups are not working anymore.

aschmid wrote:
Yes you are right, I know it isn't supported - as so many other things but they work!
This one is notorious for working for a while, then . . . not.
In addition to the problems above I got a pop-up from Time Machine saying the backup file is broken and it needs to create a new one. I told it to go ahead and what happened is that it actually proceeded to DELETE the old backup file before creating a new one - there goes my several months of backup history!
Yes, just as it says in the message. See #C13 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
All I can say do now is connect my drive directly to my iMac and figure out a way how I can backup my other iMac and the MacBook I have. On the AE this just worked remotely.
Yeah. Until it didn't.
Really not much options here to backup a home with 3 Macs!?!
Sure there is. Back the others up to the same drive, over your network, via sharing. See #22 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), for details and setup instructions.

HT201250 if my drive with my time machine backup becomes corrupt, what is a good tool to recover it?

if my drive with my time machine backup becomes corrupt, what is a good tool to recover it?

 Data recovery efforts explained
 Most commonly used backup methods explained

Data Recovery of Time Machine Backup From a Corrupted Drive

I had to install 10.2 and 9.2.2 on an internal drive in my 2003 MDD G4 but first I had to reformat it (and wipe out its data) since it did not have OS 9 drivers installed. No problem thinks I since its contents are backed up to my 500 GB Western Digital HD. Installation of 10.2/9.2.2 was successful but when I go back into 10.5.8 to restore the contents of the newly formatted drive the external drive with the Time Machine backup will not mount. It churns and grinds forever and nothing I've tried (after consulting the WD support web site) helps. It is recognized by Disk Utility but that is all.
Any thoughts on whether/how to recover the lost backup? Many thanks in advance.

mvaldeslora wrote:
Well, I am happy to report a happy ending. Turns out DW had crashed but I initiated the procedure again and it was able to rebuild the drive's directory in a couple of hours. Time Machine then recognized the drive and I was able to restore the contents of the drive on which I installed 10.2/9.2.2 earlier in this saga. I will reformat the external WD drive now and see how it performs before I decide whether it's a keeper or not. Thanks for all comments and observations.
Yay!
If those are your only backups, please do yourself a favor: do not trust them to that drive! Get a new one, and put TM backups on one, and use the other to regularly update a "clone" or at least home folder backups via CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper, or the like.
Murphy was an optimist!

Restoring data from a Time machine backup of a potentially corrupted drive

I seem to be the queen of failing hard drives, heh. I'm on my third in a year, and will be addressing the root cause of these failures, of course, but right now, I'm wondering how safe it is to restore from my Time Machine backup. Here's the scenario:
-- Drive started throwing I/O errors, detected via SMARTReporter, about 2-3 months ago. No change in how the machine functioned, all OK.
-- I continued to back up daily to TM & Crashplan
-- While traveling for a month (and not backing up anymore, I left TM home), the machine started acting funny. Finder freezing, etc. I decided to clear some caches (by booting into safe mode) and see what happened.
-- This caused the HD to fail completely. Recovery mode, target disk mode, booting into single user mode and command-lining fixes, and DiskWarrior all failed to rebuild the directory. Failures were in multi-linked files/directories, the catalog file, etc.
-- I ordered a warranty replacment drive (and a new hard drive cable for starters).
When I got home, I borrowed another machine and just did a Verify Disk on the TM backup. It came back totally clean. So, my question is: is it safe to restore the data from my TM backup to the new drive when it arrives?

Shouldn't be any problem.
Boot from your SL installer DVD (hold down the C key on startup or hold down Alt/option on start and choose the installer disc).
OK the language page (if present). From the installer screen, go to the menu bar and choose Disk Utility; depending on the OS version it may be in the Utilities menu or Tools menu.
In DU, select your internal drive in the sidebar (the top item with the makers name and serial no.). Run Repair Disk. If that comes up as disk OK, click the partition tab. Select the partiton from the drop-down above the graphic; 1 partiton is all you need. Go to the options button and ensure that the partition scheme is GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for G5 and earlier) and the file system to Mac OS Extended (Journalled). Name the partiton (usually Macintosh HD), click Apply.
When that's finished, select the new volume in the sidebar (indented to the right below the drive) and go to the Erase tab, select Security options and select zero data (one pass is more than sufficient). Click erase. That will take quite some time; probably measured in hours and dependant on the size of the drive.
When that's completed, close DU and continue with the installation.
Shortly into the installation process, you'll be asked if you want to migrate data from another source. Select 'from a Time Machine Backup' and follow the prompts.
See Pondini's FAQs;
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/19.html
http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/SetupAsst.html
That should leave you with the same setup as you had on the previous MB.

Corrupted time machine backup and Migration tool

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Thanks in advance to anyone that is able to help. Sorry for the long read.
Recently I replaced my hard drive because it was slowing down and had a very large number of bad sectors. After replacing the HD with a new one I tried to use migration assistant to move my information from the old one. As has happend with many bad hard drives it could not detect the old drive. This always happens if I try to migrate from a drive with bad sectors. The healthy ones always work.
So in an attempt to make the migration tool see the files and migrate them I am trying to use the old drive to spoof a Time machine backup.
First I set my old HD as the location of the new mac's TM backup just to get a TM backup file in place. The fist problem I ran into was that time machine backups are write protected at the kernel level and can't be modified. I found a helper module in the TMsafetynet kext that does this write protection and so, I can delete files in the backup like so.
sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMsafetynet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -Rfv /Volumes/TIMEMACHINEDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/whatever files to delete
And so, I removed and modified the files in the time machine backup slightly and migration assistant as well as time machine reflected the changes perfectly without error.
Next I deleted all that was in the time machine backup, I then moved the entire contents of my old drive into this time machine backup file in such a way as to mimic a normal time machine backup.
The good news is that time machine reads my jimmy rigged backup perfectly (which looks pretty wierd since there is no continuity between past and present), But migration assistant now does not see it.
If anyone is able to help that would be awesome. I replace bad hard drives all the time that won't copy with migration assistant, transferring the files manually isnt easy or clean. It's a pain.
Thanks a million for any advice!

Corrupted time machine backup on external hd connected to Airport extreme?

I have an Airport extreme 11n (not gigabit) and a Lacie external hard disk connected to the usb port. Time machine is set up to make backups wirelessly from my laptop to this external disk. It used to work fine, but no I have the following problem all the time: Time machine complains that it cannot perform the backup. When this happens, I cannot access the drive from the finder (normally I can). I check the drive physically and I notice that it's LED show that it is constantly reading/writing (is yellow instead of red). The solution is (as also suggested by Apple support) to use disk utility and perform a repair on the drive. This solves the problem, but... only temporarily. After one or two successful backups, the same problem: no backup possible, drive not accessible in finder, disk utility finds problems. What can i do?

Somehow I thought that with OS X 10.6 Time Machine did support disks connected to Airport devices, but I guess I'm wrong.
The LaCie disk has indeed its own external power supply brick. Is this relevant?
I found this article http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1550
which is not about airport disks, but I checked my LaCie disk and it has a Master Boot Record Partition Scheme. Should I change that?
It is also formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I thought that this was the recommended format, but checking in the Help of OS X 10.6, I found an article "Disks that can be used with Time Machine" which says: "The most common format for a Time Machine backup disk is Mac OS Extended format, but Time Machine also supports Mac OS Extended (Case sensitive, Journaled) and XSan formats"
implying that the Extended format is more preferable than the Journaled format, right?
I don't think the disk drive is defective: I after "repairing" it with disk utility, I could back up again, at least one time, before the problem reappears.

How to repair a corrupt Time Machine Backup

I have been Googling & searching also here in the support community about how delicate Time Machine is. I think I've broken so many Time Machine "don'ts" that I NOW know what I did and where I need to do things differently. Moving forward.
I have a Time Machine backup on an external HD. I have also recently re-installed Mountain Lion and now need to restore my files from Time Machine.
This is where the problem starts. Time Machine won't restore, and when I (yes, I NOW know it's a no-no, please hold your foul comments) go into the Backups.backupdb folder manually, all the folders are now shortcuts, and they lead no where.
I have tried to no avail:
To repair permissions with Disk Utility
To repair the drive with DiskWarrior
Does anyone have any (constructive) suggestions? This backup contains the usual personal documents & photos that we can all agree are most important, but also I have stuff pertaining to legal matters that I can not lose under any circumstances. Having invested $99.95 on DiskWarrior just really burns me up at this point because that was the recommended fix for this problem.
Any advice or assistance I can get from anyone would be deeply appreciated!

When I go into the "star wars" Time Machine screen, all the backups are blank & black. My Backups.backupdb folder has gone from 483Gig, to 4.72TB on a 2TB drive. When I use the finder to manually look in the Backups.backupdb folder, all the folders inside are alias' and when I double-click them, they say that the alias is broken, do I want to delete it or fix it.
I know that all the Backups.backupdb is just a database that links to the files stored on the hard drive, and I need a utility that will repair the links to each file. If no one has something that does this, perhaps this is a great opportunity for someone to create such a utility.
I'm going to try using Data Rescue to just restore the drive completely and pick through it manually.

Unable to empty trash due to a corrupt Time Machine backup.

I have a 3TB Seagate Backup Plus for my Macbook Pro. On this drive, I had a Time Machine backup from a secondary Mac that was stopped half way through. In this folder is the file '2014-10-03-144053.inProgress'. I moved the whole folder to the trash of my MBP, and can not empty the trash because of it, nor can I move the file elsewhere. I have tried the following:
Secure Empty Trash... (results in the trash being stuck on 'Preparing Items to Delete')
Using a third party software (OnyX) to empty the trash.
Executing the script:
sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes
(This results in terminal being stuck executing the second command).
Moving the file to the desktop results in finder being stuck on 'Preparing to move ... to desktop.'
What should I do?

BDAqua wrote:
Hi again, are there maybe hidden files in those folders?
Show Hidden Files 1.0...
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29096/show-hidden-files
Hidden Way is a toggle for hidden files view in Finder...
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25716/hidden-way
Show hidden files in OSX Finder
Open the Terminal and type or copy/paste:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
Reverting to the default of NOT showing hidden files:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
*Restart or Force Quit Finder required to take effect.*
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/hiddenfiles.html
http://www.burobjorn.nl/blog/?p=96
Finder Force Quit, or restart required to take effect.
Not that I saw through Terminal's ls -all and Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine. Someone told me to try secured empty trash and it did more, but not fully.
I used the administrator (sudo) account in Mac OS X 10.5.8's Terminal to delete the trash, but it still failed:
$ sudo rm -rf *
Password:
rm: 501/2010/07252010/My Documents/My Pictures: Operation not permitted
rm: 501/2010/07252010/My Documents: Directory not empty
rm: 501/2010/07252010: Directory not empty
rm: 501/2010/01162010and05042010/My Documents/My Pictures: Operation not permitted
rm: 501/2010/01162010and05042010/My Documents: Directory not empty
rm: 501/2010/01162010and05042010/Favorites: Operation not permitted
rm: 501/2010/01162010and05042010: Directory not empty
rm: 501/2010: Directory not empty
rm: 501/06182011/My Documents/My Pictures: Operation not permitted
rm: 501/06182011/My Documents: Directory not empty
rm: 501/06182011/Favorites: Operation not permitted
rm: 501/06182011: Directory not empty
rm: 501: Directory not empty
I tried deleting this on an old, updated Windows XP Pro. SP3 machine and it had no problems! Weird. I wonder why Mac OS X 10.5.8 failed to delete it through its Finder and Terminal (sudo rm -rf command).

Cannot access user data in Time Machine backup

I had some corrupt files on my iMac and after a lot of troubleshooting I had to do a clean install of OS X.
I had a Time Machine backup of the Mac with the corrupt files so I did not use the migration tool. I just want to get the files off my desktop and some other user files (/user/userX/desktop) from the backup.
When I go into the Time Machine backup to restore anything in the User folder; I get access denied.
Is there a way to take ownership of that folder? I need this data.
Message was edited by: Tom515

Strongly suggest erasing, reinstalling the OS, and using the migration tool. Resolves all such permissions and access issues.

Finder crash upon login with one account, better to copy files to new account or use Time Machine backup?

The finder crashes when I login to my old account. Briefly my problems started with iPhoto crashes and eventually to finder crashes. The finder would crash when I would try to transfer picture files from one directory to another. I'd deleted com.apple.iPhoto.plist as well as com.apple.finder.plist but these did not help. The crash is characterized by there being no menu items on the top left, but with dock icons which cannot however be clicked, and I can only resort to a hard reset to get back to the login window. I created a new admin account -- this one works -- but cannot decide whether I should just transfer files from the old account to the new account (as described somewhere in the archived support) or whether I should "go back" in time to when the system was working well (about December 2012 was the last "good" Time Machine backup -- I did a backup in February, but that was when I was already having problems). I am afraid that if I transfer certain files (especially the picture files and iphoto files) to the new account, I might cause the same problem on the new account. Any suggestion as to how to resolve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Transfer files off the machine to a external storage drive and disconnect, that way you can do anything you like.
TimeMachine may fail to restore if your drive is corrupted and can't be easily verified if your data is truly on it or will restore.
Most commonly used backup methods
..Step by Step to fix your Mac
How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6
For Snow Leopard Speed Freaks
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Time Machine backup corrupted

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