Is it possible to recover a file from a TimeMachine sparsebundle without restoring the whole system?
macOS Catalina - 10.15.1
MacBook Pro Retina
Just "Enter Time Machine," find the file, and click Restore.
Use Time Machine to restore deleted files or older files - Apple Support
Hold down the Option key and select "Browse other backup disks" from the Time Machine status menu.
I don't know if you would need to mount the sparse bundle disk image prior to using that command, or if it will accept selecting a spars bundle disk image as the source.
Double-click the sparse bundle disk image to mount it.
The get the file from the file system.
No, you didn't miss anything. Where is the sparse bundle stored?
External hard drive formatted for macOS or a NAS device? NAS are unreliable.
If all else fails, you can try to copy the files from the mounted disk image in the Finder.
I did this on terminal
% cd Laszlo’s MacBook Air.sparsebundle
% ls ..
bands com.apple.TimeMachine.SnapshotHistory.plist
com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.bckup Info.bckup
com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist Info.plist
com.apple.TimeMachine.Results.plist token
% du -hs bands
151G bands
% % du -hs ../Laszlo’s\ MacBook\ Air.sparsebundle
151G Laszlo’s MacBook Air.sparsebundle
So the file I'm looking for is in bands directory, ok
ls -lah bands
total 157862803
drwxr-xr-x 2 user wheel 21K Oct 20 10:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 user wheel 10B Dec 7 19:01 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 3.1M Aug 3 21:32 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 8.0M Aug 3 22:27 1000
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 8.0M Aug 3 22:27 1001
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 8.0M Aug 3 22:27 1002
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 8.0M Aug 3 22:27 1003
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 8.0M Aug 3 22:27 1004
...
Under bands directory there are 8MB files, data files, a lot of them
% file 1060
1060: data
% ls -lah | wc -l
21422
My file is compressed, encrypted somewhere here :-)
eureka, thank you!!!
I had one more details, I was looking for a .hidden directory, turns out that can be done with
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE;killall Finde
then undone
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE;killall Finder
Time Machine isn't set up, this is a sparsebundle of another computer
Thank you, I'm going to give it a try
Barney, this got me in, I was able to attach the old Time Machine however I can't "go back in time", I'm only seeing today's date and now's time, nothing older. Did I miss something?
Or, just cmd-shift-.
Recover a file from sparsebundle