Transferred backups to a new drive; now Backups.backupdb folder is greyed-out in Finder (with custom access)

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Transferred backups to a new drive; now Backups.backupdb folder is greyed-out in Finder (with custom access)

Hello,

Just followed Apple's knowledgebase to transfer my Time Machine backup to a new external HDD. Copy finished after 3 days (backups are since 2011, around 2 millions files) and had numerous errors while copying (that's the main reason it took so long, because I had to click OK every now and then during the copy process).

Set up Time Machine to use the new HDD, it sees the old backups with no issues, backup schedule is working just fine.

However, I cannot access the Backups.backupdb folder from the Finder. CMD-I onto the folder gives the infamous "you have custom access" prompt in folder Permissions, and I cannot seem to be able to fix it from the Finder, or the Terminal (tried a couple of ACL mumbo-jumbo, but I am not very good at ACL stuff). I can access the backups through Terminal of by telling Finder to go to "/Volumes/External/Backups.backupdb/iMac" and I can see all dated backup folders, but the Backups.backupdb folder remains greyed-out in Finder and cannot open it the normal way.

Any clues or help?

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Mar 24, 2014 2:58 AM

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Thanar Author

Level 2

300 points

Mar 26, 2014 11:44 AM in response to Thanar

I finally managed to fix this issue myself;

Looks like the copy did not finish correctly, maybe Finder crashed just before finishing, don't know what happened, but the Backups.backupdb folder had a creation date of Jan 24, 1984. Found online that Finder is having issues with files carrying such dates. Maybe the creation date flag was not set at all, and Finder was displaying this specific date or something, wouldn't know.

Anyhow, I downloaded the command line tools package from developer.apple.com and ran the SetFile -d command, setting the date/time of the folder to now.

Folder is visible now, I can open it through Finder, although "custom access" still stands.

Thanx to this thread for pointing me to the right direction.

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