Recover info off an old Time Machine HDD

HDD from an old Time Machine unit that caught fire

Not something we hear very often.. overheat yes.. but not to the catching fire!!

I have connected the unit to the Mac, and it can see that the HDD, but I am concerned that as the old Time Machine HDD is full it will start overwriting the oldest data

Amazing you can do this..

So you have the hard disk in a USB holder and plugged into the Mac??

Your Mac will not use it for backups. But do turn Time Machine off for the moment. This is a new drive as far as your computer is concerned. It has no previous connection because it has changed from network to local.

Right (Option) Click on the Time Machine Clock in the dock and use the Browse other Time Machine Disk.. that will take you to the old backups.

Now extracting a single email is not likely to be possible.. but you can recover the entire inbox or outbox.

See Pondini on how to access recover emails.

http://pondini.org/TM/15m.html

Your first screenshot shows the 3 disk partitions. Only the DATA partition which is almost the entire drive is relevant.. the other two partitions are tiny and only used by the TC internally.

The only file you have showing is the attempted backup. Which you should never have started and I hope stopped quickly enough to not cause issues.

The disk is showing nearly full. so the data is still there. It is either hidden or permissions are set wrongly.

Your data is in a sparsebundle which should have shown up. The fact that it didn't means either the drive was damaged or you are not using full admin user on the Mac or you had some password on the TC to hide files.

In your TC setup did you configure a disk password?? Or even user passwords? It can be difficult to extract data if you did that.. and of course if you have encrypted the disk or the backup.. life just got a whole lot harder.

Start by turning on view hidden files in Finder.

You can also use disk utility/terminal commands to do a check of the drive and check for permissions.

However if you have stuff that is vital to you, I would take it first to a Mac expert.. and explain what happened.

You can use a recovery software like Data Rescue or Disk Warrior.. download a trial of the former and you can test the drive.. it will not do any damage but just reads the drive and shows how much chance it has of recovery. It is $100 or so to then buy it if you have to.

If the Mac Expert cannot help you then a data recovery centre perhaps.. but note that extracting data from a disk is difficult at the best of times.. and Time Machine backups are pretty much useless unless the whole thing can be recovered intact. Even slight damage to a backup renders it unreadable to Time Machine.

The sparsebundle file should not be in trash anyway.

Let me check what happens with the disk password.

A: Yes, the TC had a password set, which I have, but without accessing it via TC I suspect I'm not going to have much luck (is that why the system is saying I don't have permission to view the Trashes folder?) I can see the contents of the other hidden folders by the way.

It is important which you set.. disk password is very different to username and password..

Give me a few minutes to test this. I usually have a TC in various stages of disassembly.

LaPastenague are you on 10.11 too? I think this is SIP in action, the OS is preventing system directories being read (I think).

To be honest I don't see the point of looking in the trash, won't the backups be under 'Backups.backupdb' instead?

won't the backups be under 'Backups.backupdb' instead?

No, this is a time capsule disk that was used in network.. that means the backups will be in sparsebundle..

No sparsebundle is visible so it is either hidden or corrupted or deleted, but not removed from the disk.

I am about to test.

Stupid of me, that folder is from the 'connecting to Mac accident' that happened earlier, sorry.

Ok.. I did have a bit of slow response but it did work.

Setup the disk password in the TC. This shows my access to the files on the TC from main computer over the network.

I removed the drive and plugged it into computer running El Capo using USB to SATA.

I can then mount the sparsebundle and see the backup dates.

However El Capo took 3 or 4 goes for it to work.. and the disk utility is utterly useless. Even if a drive doesn't show in finder it certainly should show in disk utility.

DONT WORRY 🙂 the ONLY WAY THAT IT WILL OVERRIGHT IS IF YOU SELECT IT THROUGH TIME CAPSULE. dont worry about it. just make sure you do the steps SLOWLY so that the computer has enought time to process it or it may show that it is corrupt. it may not be but if you dont do the process slowly, you will get error like, "the hard disk you inserted was not readable". or for other versions of mac you will get "the files on the hard disk drive cant be opened"

If you are in Oz Peter.. I am in Melbourne.. talk to me.. my email is open in the profile.

See a success story.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7457957