Can't restore Time Machine Backup, Lost all my files :(
Hi Everyone,
Hoping for a hail mary here. It appears that I've really screwed up and lost all the files on my Wife's computer, including wedding photos 😟
Sorry for the long story, but wanted to provide as much detail as possible in hopes that someone might be able to help.
My wife has an iMac that was running 10.5. We got a new printer that needed new software to run, so I purchased Snow Leopard. Before doing so, I made the first and only Time Machine backup that was ever made for this computer to my Seagate 3TB cloud storage device in our house. I then installed snow leopard and everything was in tact.
However, the computer ran VERY slow and was almost unusable. I did some reading online and tried to follow steps on apple forums. Nothing worked until one post suggested re-installing Snow Leopard from the disk so I decided to give that a try. Once I did that, I tried to follow the steps to install from a Time Machine backup. The computer can find the cloud device and then finds the location of the Time Machine backup. Then I hit "Continue" and it says "no backups can be found".
I then going back to installing 10.5 and had the same issue. I then gave up and went to the apple store and met with a tech at the genius bar. He did the same things that I did above and had the same result. Multiple techs came over and all said the same thing. As a last step, he tried to mount the Time Machine backup to the desktop and it says "permission denied". He tried doing this as a root user as well. He then said that they did all that they can do at the mac store and pointed me to Drive Savers. I called them and they said it will be close to $2,000 for my data to be recovered.
Hard lesson learned about having proper backups. Wedding photos and all of our memories are on that computer :/ Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? I'm desparate. I'm willing to pay Drive Savers that obscene amount of money since it is invaluable to us, but wanted to post here first.
Thanks for any help.
