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Time machine restore fail... because of 1 corrupted file

I had to do a Time Machine restore on my internal MacBook Pro 750gb hard drive. The complete backup contains nearly 700gb of data. Twice, the restore process failed at the exact same point because of a file that could not be read from my external Time Machine backup disk. When trying to manually copy everything onto my reformatted internal hard drive, I found THE corrupted file that was blocking the entire restoring process - a 6,5 mb MP4 clip !


My problem is :

1- impossible to delete or replace this corrupted file on the backup version of my computer

2- impossible to simply ignore this file during the restoration process

3- impossible to reboot my computer once a manual restoration (minus the corrupted file) is completed - the computer doesn't recognize the System Folder, even though it has been copied in one step, from the Time Machine backup disk onto my internal hard drive.

4- re-installing the OS on my "manually-restored-internal-HD" erased numerous important software extensions


Applications like Carbon Copy Cloner allow to copy everything except whatever cannot be read or written, and simply gives a report of the corrupted files at the end of the process. Is there any way of doing the same with Time Machine ? In other words, can I ask Time Machine to skip / ignore unreadable or corrupted files when restoring ?

Posted on Jul 12, 2014 4:26 AM

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Posted on Jul 12, 2014 5:44 AM

TM is not as flexible in restoring a whole disk but you can restore individual files or whole directories. If you migrate you can control to a limited extent what is copied or not.


But it is better IMHO to do a verify of the backup before you start the backup process.


See A5 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html


It should find the faulty file and fix it.. or maybe you can delete it from the backup.


See Q12 here http://pondini.org/TM/12.html


Deleting files is dangerous so I would advise making an archive first.


Also I would strongly recommend using CCC. Since you seem to know and use it.. much less troublesome than TM.

2 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Jul 12, 2014 5:44 AM in response to JFVEZINA

TM is not as flexible in restoring a whole disk but you can restore individual files or whole directories. If you migrate you can control to a limited extent what is copied or not.


But it is better IMHO to do a verify of the backup before you start the backup process.


See A5 here. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html


It should find the faulty file and fix it.. or maybe you can delete it from the backup.


See Q12 here http://pondini.org/TM/12.html


Deleting files is dangerous so I would advise making an archive first.


Also I would strongly recommend using CCC. Since you seem to know and use it.. much less troublesome than TM.

Time machine restore fail... because of 1 corrupted file

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