How to repair a corrupt Time Machine Backup

Question

How to repair a corrupt Time Machine Backup

I have been Googling & searching also here in the support community about how delicate Time Machine is. I think I've broken so many Time Machine "don'ts" that I NOW know what I did and where I need to do things differently. Moving forward.

I have a Time Machine backup on an external HD. I have also recently re-installed Mountain Lion and now need to restore my files from Time Machine.

This is where the problem starts. Time Machine won't restore, and when I (yes, I NOW know it's a no-no, please hold your foul comments) go into the Backups.backupdb folder manually, all the folders are now shortcuts, and they lead no where.

I have tried to no avail:

To repair permissions with Disk Utility

To repair the drive with DiskWarrior

Does anyone have any (constructive) suggestions? This backup contains the usual personal documents & photos that we can all agree are most important, but also I have stuff pertaining to legal matters that I can not lose under any circumstances. Having invested $99.95 on DiskWarrior just really burns me up at this point because that was the recommended fix for this problem.

Any advice or assistance I can get from anyone would be deeply appreciated!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), 2.8Ghz i7, 8G RAM, 500G 7200RPM HD

Posted on Dec 30, 2012 12:17 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Dec 30, 2012 4:32 PM in response to Richard Taylor1

What happens when you try to restore? What did you do that you think may have corrupted your backups?

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Answer 2

Dec 31, 2012 1:56 PM in response to Linc Davis

When I go into the "star wars" Time Machine screen, all the backups are blank & black. My Backups.backupdb folder has gone from 483Gig, to 4.72TB on a 2TB drive. When I use the finder to manually look in the Backups.backupdb folder, all the folders inside are alias' and when I double-click them, they say that the alias is broken, do I want to delete it or fix it.

I know that all the Backups.backupdb is just a database that links to the files stored on the hard drive, and I need a utility that will repair the links to each file. If no one has something that does this, perhaps this is a great opportunity for someone to create such a utility.

I'm going to try using Data Rescue to just restore the drive completely and pick through it manually.

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Dec 31, 2012 2:49 PM in response to Richard Taylor1

It sounds like you had a major drive failure, resulting in the loss of the hidden folder that holds multilinked files. I don't know of anything else that fits the description. If that's the case, you'll be lucky if you can salvage any data from the drive. Whether you can or not, the drive should be discarded.

This won't be much consolation, but you can prevent this kind of thing from happening again by making multiple backups. One isn't enough to be safe, as your experience shows.

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Answer 4

Dec 31, 2012 9:17 PM in response to Linc Davis

I'll be opening this drive up after I'm done to look up the serial # to see if its still under warranty. It's maybe a year old.

Just learned how delicate TM is, thats for sure. 🙂

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Answer 5

Sep 12, 2013 3:23 PM in response to Richard Taylor1

Unfortunately, I too have experienced how fragile time machine is. What I have been doing is repairing with Disk Warrior every few months when a problem popped up. However, just today, I had another issue and Disk Warrior cannot rebuild the directory. Alsoft says my Time Machine has grown too big to function anymore. He had no suggestions from their end. He did not seem to indicate that there would ever be a fix for this issue. (Bye, Bye Alsoft).

I think the Time Machine a) needs to be more robust and b) Apple needs to provide more robust means of repairing problems when they do develop. Otherwise the feature is more trouble than it is worth. I have just lost an afternoon dealing with this.

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