Time Machine Problems | Correct Usage.

Hey,

I always have two external USB drives that I use for time machine backups. Pretty much since it was launched in 2009.

Fortunately, I have never really had to use it. I have gone through a couple of Macs since. When changing Macs, I stop backing up to the old drives (for safe keeping) and have bought two new drives to initiate fresh backups on.

Now I had a Mac meltdown last weekend with a Catalina install gone wrong... After reinstalling Catalina from scratch I then tried to backup my TM. During the backup my laptop froze and one of my time machine drives was corrupted. I can no longer make new backups to that drive.

I can however launch the TM interface. Despite the drive being broken. I have been advised by an Apple chat advisor that doing this is not such a good idea.

So, that's great I have another TM drive with a practically identical set of backups on, only a couple of hours apart.

Unfortunately when I register the drive and launch the TM interface I cannot go back in time. I can see each incremental backup in red. I just can't open them.

I figure that it needs me to make a backup first. So I initiate a TM backup....

Now there's only 9GB of free space on this drive. TM didn't warn me about anything, I just know it has to delete stuff before it can do a new backup. But now it seems stuck on 'freeing up space'....

NOTICE: It was stuck there for about an hour. It has started backing up now. Total of 60GB.

Yes, this is the first initial backup of this reinstalled Catalina system over a Mojave system on the drive. SO I guess it's not so surprising that it is this large. Hopefully, this completes without an error.

So if this backup completes without error I am hoping I will be able to use the TM interface to go back in time to restore the data I would very much like to get back.

Anyhow, if you've read this far you're probably wondering what the question is.... Well, I have a few.

The work I really want to save is predominantly web development projects. Node Package Manager and Yarn based project. Yes, a lot of these are on GitHub. Certainly the important ones. But some experiments aren't.

Considering the corrupted drive still mounts and still seems to allow me to use TM interface would it be such a terrible idea to backup these files using the finder to go directly into the TM backup (the corrupted one) ?? Then copy and paste them across ??? I know that you're only meant to restore files using TM interface, but is it ever possible to copy and paste small documents from via the finder?

The advantage to doing it this way means I can leave the [node_modules] folder (which is usually quite large) and copy across the rest of the project. Going via restore would require me to copy the node modules. I know the drive is corrupted but we're probably talking about a couple of 100 MBs of JS files.

The main folder is only 8GB (most of that will be node_modules) but restoring via the uncorrupted TM would probably take quite a while.

I also have a lot of Wordpress installs via LocalByFlywheel. I think each of these will need to be manually reinstalled. I don't think it is going to be as simple as restoring the folders. I need to re-read their advice but if memory serves I have to create fresh sites and then copy the folder in. I guess it could be done via restore. But some of these also have NPM projects in them so are quite large with 100,000s of files.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I have always been very careful with my data and find myself in a situation that I have been preparing for years. But I don't feel particularly confident or in control of how this process really works.