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Q: Time Machine wiped my Time Capsule after upgrade to OS X Sierra

Equipment:
iMac 27 i5 1TB HD Mid 2011, Time Capsule 2TB Mid 2014, directly linked via Gigabit-Ethernet;

backups of 2 iPhones and 2 iPads in iTunes and more than 150GB music in Apple lossless and FLAC on the HD in the iMac, altogether 750GB.

 

What happened:

  1. I upgraded the iMac from El Capitan to Sierra, which worked fine and smoothly.

After a while Time Machine popped up with the message that there were too many changes for another incremental back-up and Time Machine needed to do a full back-up of the system.

Since this has happened in the past, I said YES and went away knowing that this would take a couple of hours over night.

 

  1. When I returned, the iMac was frozen and unresponsive.
  2. I had to shut it down via the power switch on the back.
  3. Normal Restart ended in a "click" from the parking HD and immediate shutdown after approximately two thirds of the progress bar.
  4. I started again in Recovery Mode and used Disk Utility, which told me that the disk could not be repaired.
  5. I used DiskWarrior to check the HD and to recover as much data as possible. DiskWarrior reported bad blocks on the Seagate drive and refused to do any rebuild.
  6. Since the HD was obviously nearly dead I wanted to put a new SSD into the iMac and relied on the backups on the Time Capsule (TC).
  7. When I tried to resurrect the system from the TC, I received the alarming message that there was no operating system on the TC that could be restored.
  8. Looking into the data structure of the TC revealed that there was 1.96GB free space on the TC's 2GB drive and a "backup" 35GB in size with the extension .inProgress.
  9. In the meantime I had put a new SSD into my iMac and installed Sierra. Interestingly, I could not and still cannot access the TC HD from the iMAC -- it's showing as temporarily unavailable.
  10. I managed to reactivate my 10 year old MacBook running OS 10.7.5 Lion and to connect to the TC from there.
  11. I installed trial versions of EaseUS Data Recovery and of StellarPhoenix Data Recovery, which are the only data recovery programs I could find claiming that they could handle a Time Capsule recovery.
  12. Result: Both didn't find any recoverable files from previous Time Machine backups.

 

Conclusion 1:

Looks as if Time Machine has irrecoverably deleted all old backups from the Time Capsule in order to create space.
I cannot recall that I saw any message, hint or warning from Time Machine that this would happen.
Taking into account that iOS asks several times whether or not you really want to wipe an iPhone, this is just simply unbelievable. Bad luck for me that the HD in the iMac decided to die during the full backup.

 

Conclusion 2:

Time Machine and Time Capsule cannot be trusted for backups.
I will certainly not use them for backups anymore and cannot recommend this to anyone. I will have to employ two completely independent ways of backing up my systems in the future.

 

All my software installations are lost and have to be reinstalled and some are probably lost forever.

 

HELP!!!


iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Oct 8, 2016 1:08 PM

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