El Capitan Update Corrupted My TimeMachine Backup on NAS - Anyone Know How I Can Get My Files Back?

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El Capitan Update Corrupted My TimeMachine Backup on NAS - Anyone Know How I Can Get My Files Back?

Well, the El Capitan upgrade saga continues on my mid 2007 iMAC. I swapped out its original drive after upgrading to El Capitan killed my file system. I figured that since I had a full TimeMachine backup on my WDMYCloud NAS, I was OK. Well, not really.

I installed a new 1TB drive, went through and installed El Capitan. iMAC boots fine and seems to be all there. However, when I went to try to restore my photos, music, videos, and user documents from my TimeMachine backup, I was able to connect to the drive, select the folders I needed and start a restore. Somewhere in the restore process, TimeMachine stopped. When I attempted to reenter TimeMachine, I got a message stating that TimeMachine needs to do a full backup. To my horror, my TimeMachine backup file on the NAS was changed from Sparsebundle to .purgeable. I can still see the many, many bins when I navigate to it via Finder, but I have not found a way to try and recover my data. I'm not interested in doing a full restore - at this point, I couldn't care less about the applications or settings that have been lost. Just need to find a way to get my family pictures and personal documents back. Does anyone here have any magic that you would recommend? I thought I was using best practices by having TimeMachine backup my iMAC to the NAS, but apparently not.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Oct 29, 2015 10:28 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 29, 2015 10:53 AM in response to jminonMAC

Although I don't have the required "magic wand", FWIW, I always have multiple backups

of any critical data, like photos. A single backup, as you are finding out, is just not enough

as anything can happen (Murphy always shows up when least expected or desired).

For critical data, I have always done backups independent of system backups, usually

two, sometimes more depending on the nature of the data.

Time Machine is sometimes good but has always been flakey when used with

anything other than local attached drives, Time Capsules, or with the later versions

with Airport (Extreme or Express) device attached storage.

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Answer 2

jminonMAC Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 6, 2015 9:53 AM in response to woodmeister50

Thanks Woodmeister. I agree that critical data should be backed up in multiple ways. But in this case, we're talking about a home PC that was mainly used for email and family pictures. There's got to be an expectation that consumer-grade products have some sort of reliability built-in.

Any other thoughts as to how I may be able to recover some of the data? It's killing me as I can still see 320GB worth of information spread throughout the bands on that purgeable folder. I've rebuild corrupt RAID libraries to get data that the operating system had deemed lost. I've not an expert on OS X file systems, but I have to believe there's some way to pull that data back.

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Answer 3

Feb 22, 2016 1:09 AM in response to jminonMAC

Was this TM restore failure due to the upgrade of the OS? Put differently, had you ever tried to restore any files or folders from NAS, when backups had been done with the same OS version from which you were trying to restore such files?

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