Frozo wrote:
Disk Utility returned "The volume Time Machine Backups appears to be OK."
That was quick!
Would you know what the preference file would be that holds the information as to which drives are being backed up? I may be able to do a content search for it on my recovered raw data files. Id be curious--maybe I had accidentally added the disk on the exclude list somehow!? Maybe I wasnt 100% sure, because I havent had to access it for over a year at least.
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
(That's the top-level Library folder, not the one in your user home folder). It contains the current instructions; if you make a change, that will be reflected in subsequent backups, but earlier ones won't be changed.
But of course, if you don't have the backups, you can't tell what was in that file.
Lets say it was recently deleted somehow, is there any recourse to pulling anything off it?
Even if it was recently added to the exclusion list (all internals are backed-up by default), that wouldn't affect prior backups. Those would still be in the Backups.backupdb folder, until the entire backup (or all backups of a selected item, as below) was deleted. Since you have at least a year's worth of backups, it would still have been there.
If you really want to double-check, Time Machine puts a hidden, somewhat cryptic, log in each backup folder. Among other things, it shows which volumes were backed-up.
First, you have to change the Finder to show hidden items. See #A3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting if you don't know how to do that.
Then via the Finder, locate the log file, shown in gray since we mere mortals are not authorized to read it, either:
Then you must give yourself read rights to the file. Right-click it and select Get Info. In the window that shows, open the Sharing & Permissions section at the bottom. Click the padlock and enter your Admin password, then click the plus sign and select your user account. That will give you read rights.
Open it with a text editor. Here's part of a sample, showing the "preflight" to back up two drives:
See if the "missing" drive shows up there. If not, it wasn't backed-up.
But then, even it it were physically delted, it wouldnt have been an accident, since it would have to be manually removed from each incremental folder and there are about 70 of them!
There is a "Delete all backups of ..." option in the TM browser that would do them all at once. It's almost impossible to do it by accident, though. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #12.