Time Machine Backup Missing?

just to let you know you can look at the hidden folders in iPhoto and all of the photos will be there even if you can't see them in iPhoto.

1. Open Application folder

2. Right (Secondary) click on the iPhoto Icon

3. Select Show Package Contents

then go form there you will see a folder that has the break out of all the photos form year-day.

dan weisberg wrote:

. . .

When I navigate to my time capsule, I can see saprsebundles there,

You want to look at a set of backups that's not set up as the destination for the Mac you're running on.

You should be able to use the Browse Other Backup Disks option, per the green box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #17. As noted in red, you'll need to manually mount the sparse bundle you want to get it to show up in the window.

dan weisberg wrote:

I am totally confused by my TM. First, I have it turned off, because I was fearful of overwriting the older backups, since the TM shows only 13.53GB available of the 1 TB drive. When I do turn it on, and click the TM in the dock nothing happens.

Several things can cause that; try just re-selecting it as the destination. (When you do that, it will show "None" for the oldest and latest backup dates, but that's just the display -- it doesn't mean the backups are gone.)

That will turn TM on, though, so you'll want to turn it off again.

The same with browse other backup disks - nothing happens.

If the above doesn't work, that should, but you may have to mount the sparsebundle first, per the red paragraph in the green box of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #17.

If neither works, the backups may be corrupted. Try repairing them, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

If still no help, try the other things in #E4 of the Troubleshooting link.

My missing photos are primarily from 3/09 through 12/09, with a few earlier and a few later. When I open the sparsebundles I can find, although there are some photos in the iphoto libraries from 2009, none are the missing ones.

How many sparse bundles do you have? There should only be one per Mac (although if you ever had the logic board replaced, that looks like a different Mac, so might start a new one).

I can't find a single non-sparsebundle TM backup

Not on a Time Capsule. All backups made over a network are placed in sparse bundles. Only when you back up to an internal or directly-connected external HD are the backups just placed in a Backups.backupdb folder at the top level of the drive.

dan weisberg wrote:

I have at least three sparsebundles,

Not sure why you say "at least three" unless the Time Capsule is set up to Secure shared disks with accounts (per the Disks window of Airport Utility). In that case, there may be multiple accounts on the TC; each one must log on with its name and password, and will see only what belongs to that particular account:

If you backed-up with one account for a while, then changed to another, each would have a sparse bundle for the same Mac.

Othewise, there should be one sparse bundle per Mac.

they all seem to have the same data in them.

They'll all have the same folder structure, but the contents should be the same as the Mac that made them.

The big question is are there some earlier backups lurking somewhere - I thought I had read that TM keeps earlier backups even though it may not display them.

If you don't see them via the Finder, either there's nothing else there, or there's some sort of corruption or damage.

Since I see these backups through finder, would the display other tm backups display something different if I could get it to work?

Nothing extra, unless there's damage that can be fixed.

The sparsebundles seem to mount and open through finder, but nothing works through tm itself.

Have you tried the things in my previous post?

dan weisberg wrote

. . .

Should be only one sparsebundle, but I probably copied things in the past - this is almost 3 years that I'm still coming back and hoping to find these photos on a backup somehow. When I open Airport Utility I don't even see a menu bar like your image shows, and when I go to the menu itself all options including disk are greyed out.

Here is my finder window with the sparsebundles:

Ah, ok, I didn't realize you'd been copying them (and that means you don't have separate accounts).

But if the backups are made at different times you would think the files would be different. If I have photos taken every month, shouldn't the backups from say February have additional files than the backups from January?

Ordinarily, yes. But if iPhoto is open while a backup is running, Time Machine may not be able to back up the change: Backing up iPhoto libraries with Time Machine. TM does not put up a message to that effect (we keep asking for one), but there is one in the log for the next backup saying, in tech-speak, that it will try again. Apparently Apple figures it will get it sooner or later!

This is all complicated, of course, by the fact that you can no longer see individual photos in your backups via the Time Machine browser, and unless you understand the iPhoto file/folder layout, it can be very difficult to find the actual photos inside it, so you have no real way to tell what's there. All you can do is restore the whole thing.

That's one thing you might want to try; use the Time Machine browser to restore one of those old versions of the iPhoto Library, but to a different location, such as your Desktop (see Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #16 if you;re not sure how to do that). Then use iPhoto to display it. Hold the Alt/Option key while starting iPhoto, and you'll get a menu to select which one you want to see.

But it doesn't sound promising. 😟

dan weisberg wrote:

. . .

Much of the suggestions you give refer to using TM, but again I can't seem to do that because no matter what I try TM won't do anything,

I'll ask one last time: does "no matter what I try" include Repairing them per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting and/or the other things in #E4 of the same link?

If I were able to use TM, would it reveal anything that I am not seeing in finder?

If you haven't done the above, possible but doubtful.

Oddly, my sparsebundle is dated as created 12/9/09, but I know I had been backing up much ealier than that, but can't find any earlier backups than a folder dated 12/23/09.

That 12/9/09 date might be the date you copied the sparsebundle; if so, it could contain earlier backups; if you then backed-up to it, it could have newer ones.

So unless I am looking in all the wrong places (meaning I should be looking somewhere other than the iphoto library in any of these backups), or unless I get TM to work and it would show something Finder isn't, I may well have to give up and start trying to at least recover the thumbnails that still appear so I can at least have them.

Again, short of some sort of directory corruption, if you can't find it via the Finder, it ain't there. 😟

And if all your backups were made to the Time Capsule, and you didn't copy something elsewhere, there's nowhere else to look.

just to let you know you can look at the hidden folders in iPhoto and all of the photos will be there even if you can't see them in iPhoto.