Time Machine Permissions Problem

To answer your questions:

1. Yes, the restore was via the "Star Wars" display.

2. Yes, I logged onto the correct user account. The full backup and attempted restore were done without logging out at all.

3. I have the same problem with every file in the backup.

4. I tried it with another user. That did work and interestingly it asked for a password, which it does not do when I try to restore a file from my "standard" user.

I am very familiar with technologies, I work in IT, and I have absolutely no idea why a clean backup and restore straight away does not work. My only solution so far is to either (a) use cp -R and manually copy the files from the backup or (b) restore to a Disk Image and copy from there. The Time Machine looks perfect, something somewhere must be screwing up the permissions but I cannot see where or how :-o

Thanks for the note. Yes, I have done that. Have also rebooted using the Recovery Drive and reset the Home Directory permissions and that did not fix the problem either. After my first failure to restore I completely checked/repaired all the permissions and deleted the Time Capsule of all backups and started completely from scratch. The system had exactly the same problem after the "cleanup" as before. That is why it does not seem right...

Oh dear, copy everything to another user...fun :-))) Well, I will have to try that one a lot later today/tonight and see how it goes. If it works I will definitely compare the permissions and extended attributes. When nothing makes sense one has to keep weeding until some kind of path can be found, thanks :-)

"..you won't have to copy everything". Whoops I was too late, I have now done this.

OK, this next bit also totally surprises me. I created a new user and copied across all the data files, Library files etc. As soon as I logged into the new user Time Machine came up with a message saying that my existing backup was invalid and that it needed to delete all my backups and create a new one from scratch. That was a total surprise because that is exactly what I had been doing under the previous user. So, I let Time Machine do it again (which took about 9 hours). After that...well...my restores work perfectly!!! Obviously there was something with the previous user that Time Machine did not like. However, Time Machine could not repair itself until a new user was created and it could undo/redo everything. Certainly an extraordinary turn of events and I cannot technically explain any of it. Weird how Time Machine found a problem and reset itself....I wonder what that was...

Oh....that is shortcut for "we know that there is a problem, we think it is our fault but we are not going to tell you about it, the solution is to wipe everything and we will see if we get it right the second time".

So, the summary is:

- Time Machine may create a corrupt backup bundle for a user.

- This corruption will continue to happen, even if you delete the backup and restart/reinitialize Time Machine backups.

- The corruptions manifest themselves when you try to restore - you will receive error messages saying you do not have permission to restore from backup.

- The solution is to completely delete the affected user, create a new user and copy your old data into this new user.

- Delete the old user.

- Time Machine will recognise the error of its ways and will request that it delete all backups and start again. This should fix the problem.

That seems to be the summary.

I am more than happy to use Time Machine; it is nicely integrated with all the Apple products, it is easy to use, you can get under the covers and resolve more technical aspects if you need to, there are a huge number of people using it, it is simple, it has most of the features that most people would want. The particular problem above is pretty left feild but one never stops using a product because of that (if you did, there would be nothing left to use). I like the fact that you are able to go in and troubleshoot. My only wish is that someone had found this problem/solution earlier so that I could have been extremely lazy and just followed the workaround, rather than having to wake up and do some thinking myself :-)