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VonLuken Author

Level 1

9 points

How can I access sparsebundle?

I pulled the hard drive out of my Time Capsule, put into enclosure, and connected directly to a Mac. I can see three sparsebundles, but when I double click on any of them, nothing happens. I’m pretty sure I had accessed these before, but I’m not sure how.

I don’t have room on my Mac to store any sparsebundle, so I bought an external hard drive. Do I need to make this a boot drive for the sparsebundle to open? Can I view files in the sparsebundle and pull out what I want? Is there a utility that allows me to do this?

iMac 27″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Feb 28, 2021 2:31 AM

Best reply

LaPastenague

Level 9

67,226 points

Posted on Feb 28, 2021 12:37 PM

when I double click on any of them, nothing happens.

Double check because when you double click a sparse bundle in Finder it should mount itself as Time Machine Backup..

Example.

I double clicked an old sparse bundle on a TC.

Result .. You can see Time Machine Backups.. Now click Time Machine Backups.

And you get backups.backupdb

Click Backups.backupdb and you get

Keep clicking on each date in turn and you get..

And so on and so forth ad infinitium.

This is a very difficult method to extract files.. since to collect all the files in a folder you need to assemble the files from every date available.

If this fails you should get a permissions error. Not nothing.

A far better idea is to use Time Machine to open a different sparse bundle.. oh but there is a problem.

You cannot have the Backup mounted in Finder and Time Machine so unmount it in Finder and then simply open it in Time Machine.

It can take a long while to populate.. several minutes for the disks with time machine.. then Time Machine could take an hour as it has to reindex the backup.

Tell us where you get to.

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How can I access sparsebundle?

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