Yosemite time machine file restore problem

I'm trying to restore some files (iPhone backups) in OS X Yosemite, but am encountering a problem.
I can locate the files I need in Time Machine. When I hit restore the 'Star Wars' UI exits as I would expect, and the 'preparing to copy files' dialogue box appears.
At this point, it goes no further. I also get the following message in the console:
15/11/2014 6:00:30.406 am Finder[236]: setting error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format." (Unexpected character at line 1) UserInfo=0x60800067d7c0 {NSDebugDescription=Unexpected character at line 1, kCFPropertyListOldStyleParsingError=The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format.}
Any advice on how to address this will be greatly appreciated. I'm currently verifying the backup in Time Machine, but other than that I'm out of ideas.

Jimbo, have you looked in the system’s Trash? Just see if it needs to be emptied to free up space. As Eric mentioned, I’ve only done a complete restore by wiping the disk, reinstalling the OS, etc. so I’m just guessing in your situation something is still lying around.
You could also look in Spotlight for a folder (whose full name I can’t recall now) that begins with the name “Previous System” or something like that in your boot drive; it is created to archive your previous system in case you want to revery to an earlier version. If your system is fine now, it is safe to delete that folder - just remember to empty the Trash.

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Time machine backup restoring problem

i recently restored my mac. i saved everything through time machine on a hd. i want to restore some notes from the inbuilt notes app from mac. i know the folder is hidden and sandboxed and all and i followed the procedure, but MY PROBLEM IS that i dont have a containers folder in the backup folder. i typed in search box and everything but dint come. now the peculiar part is that when i typed com.apple.notes there was a folder. but when i opened it it dint have the data-library-core data folders. the other thing is that when i looked for the folder on my mac, it was there but the end instruction said that there should be a p18.notesexternalrecord thing in the 0 folder, which wasnt there either. somebody plz help because my very important documents are there and my job may be at stake. please help.

Quit Notes and temporarily disable iCloud synchronization, if applicable.
Triple-click the line below to select it:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Reveal
from the contextual menu. A Finder window should open with an item selected. Enter Time Machine and restore the selected item.

Clean Install around Boot Camp partition with time machine file restore

Currently at 10.5.8 on MacBook with a bootcamp partition. I am wondering if I can:
Make a timemachine backup
Wipe the mac partition, leave bootcamp partition alone
Install clean 10.6 OS
Use Time Machine to restore non-OS docs, apps, and other files
Just asking...

Yes, you can. Perform the erase and install normally and then either use Time Machine or the Migration Assistant to restore the backup.
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Install new hard drive, restore from Time Machine, File Vault Problems

Hello all,
I spent way too much time on this seemingly simple task, so I thought I would share my experience with others so they can avoid some pitfalls when upgrading a hard drive in a system that uses File Vault 2 encryption. The basic goal here is to replace a drive in a system that has only one drive, and the OS is Mavericks, and then have the new drive encrypted as before.
The problem is that a Time Machine restore onto a new drive will leave that without a Recovery Partition, which is required for File Vault 2 and some other important things. So we need to build a recovery partition. There are possibly several ways to do this.
Here's what worked for me (this is compiled from many sources that I found and already closed the tabs in my browser so I can't list all my sources):
1) Make a full backup to an external hard drive using Time Machine.
2) Go into the App Store and download OS X Mavericks but dont install it (close the window when it pops up asking to continue the install). Do this even if you already have Mavericks. At this point, there will be a folder in your Applications folder called Install OS X Mavericks (or similar).
3) Insert a USB drive that is at least 8 GB and format it using Disk Utility, naming it the default "Untitled".
4) Open a terminal and type
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction
5) Wait for this to finish (took me about 30 min). Eject the USB drive and power down.
6) Remove the old hard drive and set it aside. Keep it for a few weeks until you know the new drive is working as expected.
7) Install the new hard drive and insert the USB drive. Hold the option key and press the power button. Choose to boot from the USB installer.
8) Use the disk utility to erase whatever partition shipped with the new drive, replacing it with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) system. Verify that GUID is the partition type (in Advanced options).
9) Close the disk utility and install Mavericks. This can take a long time. My new drive is an SSD, and it sat at the "1 second remaining" part for about 20 min. Let it reboot (maybe it was 2 times?) and go through the setup until it finishes the install.
10) Boot into the freshly installed OS and open a terminal and type:
diskutil list
11) If there is a partition listed as Apple_Boot Recovery HD (mine was 650 MB), then you now have a recovery partition. If not, then go into the App store and download Mavericks, but don't use the USB this time, choose to do a regular install (or reinstall to be more correct).
12) Now there will be a recovery partition on the new drive and Time Machine will not overwrite it when restoring. Power down the system.
13) Plug in the Time Machine backup drive used in step 1. Press the option key and power on. Choose to boot from the recovery partiton (Mavericks).
14) Choose to restore from Time Machine backup. Wait until it finishes and log into the old familiar account.
15) Start a terminal and verify the recovery partition is still there (type diskutil list and see that the Apple_Boot Recovery HD is there). If it's missing, choose to download Mavericks from the App Store again and run the installation from this one.
16) Once there is a Mavericks recovery partition on the restored data you can simply turn on File Vault from the System Preferences Security section. It will require a reboot and then you login and wait for it to finish.
What a major pain to go through all of this for the sake of upgrading a hard drive. This should not be anywhere near as complicated. I hope this helps others avoid the very time consuming trial and error I went through in developing this procedure.

Talked with Apple last night. Everything we did to restore lost images failed to fix the issue. I did have the images still on my camera's SD card so I was not breaking out in a cold sweat.
All Time Machine backups showed the same issue. HOWEVER, I suddenly remembered I also had a SuperDuper backup and voila. The images were there.
Moral of the story: you can't ever be too rich or have too many backups (I also have an offsite backup).

Issues with Time Machine File Restore Permissions and Interface

Hi All,I bought a Time Capsule in January 2010, and i've had backups since then.
Time Machine's interface has pretty much always been laggy as ****, but I've always put that down to using it over wifi, perhaps that was a wrong assumption.
Anyway, I went to open a folder in a virtual machine which resides in my mac's documents folder, and it wasn't there. Sure enough this folder wasn't in my documents folder, so I thought i'd restore it from time machine. Time machine shows every segment as a pink fully coloured one (signalling theres a backup there) for a few secs, before most of them turn into a pale pink. Looking into the issue further, it seems as though I don't have permission to access the documents folder on a lot of backups, by looking at the users/brett/ folders on them (which i do have access to), right clicking on the restricted folder shows that everyone has no access, and it's fetching the other user. Trying to add myself to it doesn't work.
I have gone through two MBPs with the same backup set, and a number of hard drives (the latest being a SSD I put in yesterday, and the migration assistant restore from time machine worked without skipping a beat - never had a problem doing full restores or migrations, just using the interface)
Obviously the easiest thing to do would be to start afresh, but I'd rather not as I'd lose 2 years worth of backups, and who's to say this wouldn't just happen again in the future? Could this be why the interface is so slow too?
Thanks guys

studentguy wrote:
Time Machine's interface has pretty much always been laggy as ****, but I've always put that down to using it over wifi, perhaps that was a wrong assumption.
Yes, there is a lot going on to "populate" the display -- it can be sluggish even to a FireWire 800 drive.
Looking into the issue further, it seems as though I don't have permission to access the documents folder on a lot of backups, by looking at the users/brett/ folders on them (which i do have access to), right clicking on the restricted folder shows that everyone has no access, and it's fetching the other user. Trying to add myself to it doesn't work.
I don't do Windoze, so am not familiar with the structure of the VM files, or how the permissions on them work. Many folks exclude them from Time Machine, and back them up separately.
I have gone through two MBPs with the same backup set, and a number of hard drives (the latest being a SSD I put in yesterday, and the migration assistant restore from time machine worked without skipping a beat
Yes, because it simply copies whatever permissions are there. It doesn't need to (and shouldn't) check whether the logged-on user has permission to anything.
Could this be why the interface is so slow too?
It could be a contributor.
Can you set the permissions on the VM files on your Mac so everyone has read rights? That should at least allow you to restore their backups.

Time machine/iPhoto restore problem

I upgraded from my late 2009 iMac to the new iMac. I used my time machine drive to completely restore everything. When I opened iPhoto all of the photos seem to be there. The problem is that iPhoto went from being 73 gb in size to 65 gb in size. Does anyone know why this would happen? Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

There is an "iPod cache" file in your iPhoto library that doesn't get backed up. A few users have reported that it can eat up many GBs.

Time Machine file owner problem

I have a Firewire drive connected to my iMac. I back up the iMac and a Macbook Pro to it. Due to problems with the MBP's wireless I fell back from 10.6.1 to 10.5.8. That didn't fix my problem so I went back to 10.6 after an erase and install of 10.5 and the upgrade to 10.6.
I just noticed a file owner problem with my Time Machine backups from the MBP. The laptop has one admin and two regular user accounts. The two regular accounts have the owners swapped so that when I enter TM and look through the backups of the home folders, the icons have a red do not enter sign.
I just went to the iMac and looked through the MBP's backup data with the root account. Some of the MBP files list an owner not even on the MBP, but on the iMac.
Long term I'd like to move the two computer's backups to separate partitions, but can I fix the ownership on the TM drive safely?

Steve_6 wrote:
I have a Firewire drive connected to my iMac. I back up the iMac and a Macbook Pro to it. Due to problems with the MBP's wireless I fell back from 10.6.1 to 10.5.8. That didn't fix my problem so I went back to 10.6 after an erase and install of 10.5 and the upgrade to 10.6.
I just noticed a file owner problem with my Time Machine backups from the MBP. The laptop has one admin and two regular user accounts. The two regular accounts have the owners swapped so that when I enter TM and look through the backups of the home folders, the icons have a red do not enter sign.
I just went to the iMac and looked through the MBP's backup data with the root account. Some of the MBP files list an owner not even on the MBP, but on the iMac.
Long term I'd like to move the two computer's backups to separate partitions, but can I fix the ownership on the TM drive safely?
do not change ownership of anything on the TM drive. if I understand you correctly the two standard accounts seem to own each others home directories on the backup, is this right? that can be easily fixed by swapping UIDs of those accounts. but i first want to make sure that I understand the issue correctly.

Time machine file restore fails "you don't have permissions to access.."

Frequently I work my macbook (10.7.3) in the terminal as root. I seems like files that owned by root are not eligable for restore via time machine by the system administrator. Is there a way to operate time machine as root? Or is there a way to grant root rights to the user account designated as administrator?
Specifically, the time machine copy dialog reports "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access [filename]. For example, in one case case, it is .gitignore.

In post https://discussions.apple.com/message/9945786#9945786 Scott T. states that "time machine always runs as root.", I take that to mean that time machine will have rights to copy all files, regardless of the owner.
That's great. So I can restate the question: how do I restore a file that is owned by root?

Time Machine File Restoration

I am trying to recover files from an old Time Machine Sparsebundle that was created by a computer that I no longer own. I can see the file on my Time Machine, but my computer seems to only want to mount the Sparsebundle that belongs to it. I tried to use Migration Assistant to transfer the old file, but it does not want to recognize it either.

I probably confused matters by saying Time Machine instead of Time Capsule. What I meant is that I can see the Sparsebundle on the mounted Time Capsule, but I have no way of accessing this information because it was created by a different computer that I no longer own.
Surely there is a way that I can get to the information that is in the Sparsebundle that resides on my Time Capsule.
When I access the Time Capsule through Time Machine, it will only allow the backup file for that computer to be read. The same is true when I try Migration Assistant. I know the bundle is there, but these methods won't recognize it.

Yosemite install deleted files from Time Machine!! Yosemite installation deleted a printer application. Went into Time Machine to restore the printer app and it was gone! Now I wonder what else is gone.

Installed Yosemite on iMac desktop. Made sure I backed up and disconnected external hard drive. Yosemite deleted a printer/scanner application. Went into Time Machine to restore it and it was gone. When external hd was remounted Yosemite went into it, probably to index, and deleted the application from all backups. Wonder what else is missing?? Besides being unbelievably SLOW now I have to see what else has been lost.

Can you simply navigate to your Time Machine backup with the Finder? Treat it like an external hardrive and just look for your old Applications folder. /Applications/
Also, quite a few apps put config and support files in ~/Library/Application\ Support/
So you may be able to get the files from there as well.

I used time machine to restore on a formatted MAC. Now the HDD space has reduced by 100GB but I cannot see any of the files. How do I find and delete those 100GB data from the HDD?

I used time machine to restore on a formatted MAC. Now the HDD space has reduced by 100GB but I cannot see any of the files. How do I find and delete those 100GB data from the HDD?

dglenn9000 wrote:
I created a new user account just to see if it was my user Library or if there was something wrong with my system. And the new user account is doing most of the same things so I will need to do a full restore anyway.
Not necessarily. I'd suggest downloading and installing the "combo" update. That's a combination (thus the clever name) of all the updates to Leopard since it was first released, so installing it should fix anything that's gone wrong since then, such as with one of the normal "point" updates. Info and download available at: http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacOS_X_10_5_8_ComboUpdate Be sure to do a +Repair Permissions+ via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) afterwards.

Time machine was not working. I bought a new time machine and migrated time machine files to new time capsule; not recognized by yosemite

Time machine was not working after yosemite upgrade on new and old MacBooks in my house. I bought a new time machine and migrated time machine files to new time capsule. I changed the names of the older sparse bundles to the default values. Yosemite still does not recognize them.

I presume the bought a time machine means a time capsule.
How did you migrate the Time Machine files?
From where? A Time Capsule or external drive?
It is difficult to get TM working with Yosemite.. since it doesn't work after the upgrade on the old TM backup.. it will not work on the migrated files either.
You simply start a new backup and store the old backups for a few months until you are ready to dump them.
The instructions for inheriting old backups is B5 and B6 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
However it is just unlikely to work.. TM in Yosemite is very different. Broken even.
I also strongly recommend people to use Carbon Copy Cloner or some other 3rd party backup until Apple get the bugs fixed. And after several months.. they are still rampant.

I recently took my imac in for a recall on the hard drive, they replaced my hard drive, i used time machine to restore all my files. Now when I turn time machine on it says back up failed not enough space, it is not overwriting old back ups.

I recently took my imac in for a recall on the hard drive, they replaced my hard drive, i used time machine to restore all my files. Now when I turn time machine on it says back up failed not enough space, it is not overwriting old back ups. Why? Please help

http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

Since I installed Yosemite, Time Machine is not doing any backup. It just keep coming with the following message in a window: "Backup Failed. Time Machine could´t back up to "....... Time Capsule". What can I do start backing up again?

Time Machine not working since Yosemite was installed.

I had this issue too and went through all the great suggestion found on this site, but finally was able to resolve it after looking at the system.log to see the reason it was failing. By using terminal and entering:
sudo grep backupd /var/log/system.log
I saw "Backup failed with error:11". Then looking above, I saw many "Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES /Applications/" messages. After "Applications" I saw the culprit files that were causing Time Machine to fail. I deleted some Apps that I didn't need and found Time Machine would get farther than before. I then looked at the system.log again and saw it failing on the remaining Apps. I was able to use Time Machine to restore these App directories from a couple months ago before the Time Machine was failing. Now the problem is resolved. Whew! It seemed to be choking on corrupt files and these can be corrected by restoring earlier ones that were not corrupted.
Well, I thought I should share this with others that may have run into the same issue so they can save time. Hope it helps!

Can't access Time Machine files since upgrading to Mavericks

I have searched the community and found that people have experienced issues backing up to Time Machine since upgrading to Mavericks, but my problem appears slightly different from the ones I've found. I can see that my Time Machine is actually backing up since the upgrade as it was before the upgrade. The issue I'm having is that I can't access the backed-up files in any way.
When I try to open time machine it launches the "space view" with all of the historical tabs lined up for me to scroll through, but imediately closes that window and gives the error message: "Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disc". It's so weird, because it says that there have been backups completed since the upgrade (most recently this morning). If it wasn't writing to the disc, it would have showed me an error of some sort.
What I am, specifically, trying to accomplish is that I need to restore some iTunes playlists that I somehow managed to delete this past weekend. I figured that I would easily be able to access the library file that contains the playlists from Saturday morning, when I KNOW that playlist was still there, and just restore it. Now that I am seeing that I can't access any of my time machine files, I'm realizing that I have an even bigger problem, and that all of my files are, essentially, going without backup at this time (assuming I can't access the files that have already been backing up).
If anyone has some insight as to how I can fix this problem, I would greatly appreciate it.

Hi John, (The above was for your attention) I'm 72 and must've hit the wrong button!!!
I followed your instructions to the letter, but sadly, no success...all my backups are showing on the TM external HD, but I cannot access them after instsalling 'Mavericks'
I spent the entire day on and off the phone with Applecare (they are very nice, and I'm sure they know most of the stuff needed; but not this problem. They are phoning back tomorrow as the senior chap was not available.
I love my apple products, and like you, have been using their gear for well over 25 years...not studying the things, but using them all the way through.
My present Mac, a 24" iMac is nearly 7 years old, bought on December 11th 2007, and this is the first time I have had a significant problem, and never a virus..got bless em!. I bet there are not many Windows users around who can say the same!
However, if I cannot access my backups, I'm a bit lost, as all my accumulated stuff is there!
I guess the worst case scenario is that I revert to OS X 10.7.5, and wait 'til the bugs are ironed out in Mavericks....Ho Hum
Message was edited by: briinoz

Yosemite time machine file restore problem

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