Mail folders in Time machine back up are missing

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Mail folders in Time machine back up are missing

I got two questions. First, I just got a new 14” M1 map. I bought a new Samsung T5 1 gb external drive for time machine back ups. And when I did the back ups, there is no mail file at all in the library section. In fact there is no library in the folder under user name. Some thing changed. What changed? See photos and sorry they are sideways Screen shots were too big this is the progression of opening back up folder

even on older back up drives I have mail back up folders in some back ups but not other folders. I have 3-4 external drives and I have run time machine back ups using them. And some have my mail backed up. Some do not.

Posted on Jan 30, 2022 2:51 PM

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Answer 1

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lllaass

Level 10

210,471 points

Feb 1, 2022 12:58 AM in response to coronaglen

So you are saying that you attached a new external drive and started using that as the ™ backup drive?

If yes when you select that new disk in ™ preferences did you select the option to start over/complete backup or similar wording and not the option to just only continue to do incremental backups? If the latter if you had no change since last didk then thery ay be no Mail folder.

Also, if you go to ™ preferences>Options check to see if user Library is excluded.

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Answer 2

lllaass

Level 10

210,471 points

Jan 31, 2022 1:19 AM in response to coronaglen

I really can't read it sideways.

Your Mail folder are under your User Library, not under system Library.

Here is where it is for mys startup disk labeled Intel...

Startup disk>Users>Your user>Library>Mail V9 is for Monterey.

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Answer 3

lllaass

Level 10

210,471 points

Jan 31, 2022 6:50 AM in response to coronaglen

Try using List View vice Icon view I just used Icon View and noticed that many icons did not show if the Finder window was not wide enough unless you scroll sideways.

Have you checked different backups i time? Maybe nothing changed in that time so nothing was backed up.

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Answer 4

coronaglen Author

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Jan 31, 2022 6:19 AM in response to lllaass

Sorry about the photos. They were normal when I loaded them. I couldn’t fix them. And everything I try now is too big of a file.

I am going to library under USER. It isn’t there.

so I am wondering does it have anything to do with how the back up drive is formatted? Would partitioning it make a difference?

half my external drives with back ups don’t have mail. Half do. It’s so frustrating.

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Answer 5

coronaglen Author

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Jan 31, 2022 7:30 PM in response to lllaass

thanks. I will try. it was a brand new ssd back up so it did back up. no mail folder. then today I bought another Lacie backup drive to see if it was a Samsung issue. backed it up again with another new drive and no mail! crazy.

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Answer 6

coronaglen Author

Level 1

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Feb 2, 2022 10:37 PM in response to lllaass

So second level support at Apple is always great. They dialed in and knew almost immediately why I was not seeing my mail on some back up drives and I could on others. It was a permissions issue. So he had me enter the following into my terminal and then I restarted. And basically unhid everything.

Also gave me the thing to put into terminal to hide everything again.

Here is what you enter to unhide folders:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true && osascript -e 'quit app "Finder"'

And to hide again:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false && osascript -e 'quit app "Finder"'

anyway, it worked. and now it is off to figure out why I don't have permissions.... another day to battle that.

Thanks all.

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Answer 7

coronaglen Author

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Jan 31, 2022 6:30 AM in response to lllaass

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Mail folders in Time machine back up are missing

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