migration assistant restore problem with time capsule

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Level 1

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migration assistant restore problem with time capsule

Hi People,

I have the weirdest of all problems. Let me explain what happend and you will be as amazed as I am now.

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I have been using a 2TB time capsule for about a year and a half now. Every day for 18 months everything was being backupt. Everything smooth no problem.

My 27" iMac needed a fresh install at home because I have been upgrading from SL to Lion and thing got a bit odd. So this is what I did in a nut shell.

1. Bought a new 27" iMac Quad core with 12 Gb ram etc. (I bought it for my office)

2. At home started up the new iMac and the migration assisant asked me what I wanted.

3. Did a full restore from the TC and all my user data was restore to the new iMac!

=== Hurray so far, evrything worked liked it should.===

This was my test, now I was confident to erase my "old" iMac and do a full Lion reinstall and then use migration assisant to restore all files.

It worked with the new iMac so nothing to loose.

So I erased the new iMac, boxed it again and took it to the office.

Now It was time for my old iMac to be reinstalled.

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4. So I erased my "old" iMac.

5. Did a clean Lion install from DvD.

6. Did all software updates (as I had done with the new iMac).

7. started Migration Assistant

8. Pointed to the time capsule and did everything like the day before

9. Got an error message.

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***?? I tested this it should work. Now ALL my data is gone. All my movies, honeymoon, kids growing up, etc etc etc etc.

Everything gone gone gone!

So now I can browse to the TC and see the sparsebundle file. It is 1.5TB. I can show package contents and see the files, I can go into the "Bands" dir. and see a bunch of files. But I can not repair, mount, use disk utils with the sparsebundle.

The data must be in the 1.5 Tb file but I have no way of accessing it.

I need some good advice / help from someone because my whole family history is gone at this moment 😟.

Posted on Jan 3, 2012 3:12 AM

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Answer 1

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jan 3, 2012 3:49 PM in response to Woxxxxxx

Woxxxxxx wrote:

. . .

My 27" iMac needed a fresh install at home because I have been upgrading from SL to Lion and thing got a bit odd.

That's usually the last thing to try. 😟 Depending on what was wrong, simply installing a fresh version of OSX would be likely to fix it. If not, finding and addressing the actual problem would probably be much better than starting with the "nuclear" option.

5. Did a clean Lion install from DvD.

6. Did all software updates (as I had done with the new iMac).

7. started Migration Assistant

It's much better to use Setup Assistant when your Mac first starts up after installing OSX, to prevent Problems after using Migration Assistant.

9. Got an error message.

Was that the "some backups cannot be opened" message? If so, try to repair them, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

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Answer 2

Woxxxxxx Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 8, 2012 2:26 PM in response to Woxxxxxx

Okay, things are working again.

This is what I did.

Instead of double clicking the sparsebundle file or right clicking and picking an option. I decided to "drag" the sparsebundle file to the disk utility that was already open.

Waited a few hours (because the sparsbundle was 1.5 TB).

Then did a verify disk.

It failed after hours and hours.

Did it again and it did not fail.

Then a verify and repair and waited for hours and hours

Then I was able to mount the disk again and even use the migration assistant!! w00t!!

Everything is restored right now and all is working. It took hours and hours of computing time to fix and verify the sparsebundle, but it was worth it.

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