Recover Time Machine backups from APFS disk?

Thanks, mdb288. I could not quite tell at which stage you had the password entry problem, but I was unable to enter my boot password for the newly formatted High Sierra drive (see Clean install High Sierra - APFS encrypted boot password keyboard problem; may not be related, though).

Re backups, I am confident that –

• My portable hard drive will die before Amazon AWS catastrophically loses three global data centres
• I'll misplace this drive before everyone at Apple forgets where the keys to its data centres are
• Amazon AWS / Apple are unlikely to reformat their entire infrastructure when tired at 3am

Finally, whilst this is a moving target I also believe that both companies will – through technology and policy – make reasonable efforts to safeguard privacy to a degree that is more robust than many other organisations that hold personal data.,

Thanks, Kappy, for the additional insight - I appreciate your keeping on top of this question. It's also true that Time Machine will reformat a drive if is configured with APFS; further evidence.

It is possible to copy a (non-corrupted) Time Machine backup using Finder (see, for example, Time Machine: How to transfer backups from a current backup drive to a new backup drive - Apple Support), which may explain how previously I – and it seems many others – had experienced no problems copying files and folders from Time Machine's (HFS+) backups.

Still, as noted above, I gave up trying to recover the Time Machine archive from the volume I foolishly converted to APFS and have since reformatted. (The 1TB encryption process finished after about 21 hours.) It will be interesting to see whether someone with deeper low-level technical knowledge finds a way to recover from this problem - I'm sure that Jocelyn and I shan't be the only people to fry their Time Machine backups by converting the volume to APFS.

You're more awake than I, Jocelyn - I'd already read how Time Machine required links that were incompatible with APFS but still enthusiastically responded to a piece encouraging 'convert all external drives to AFPS too'!

I looked through pretty much everything Google served up, including the Developer forums, for a solution, but found none. Lots of journalists and 'tech gurus' trotting out the official advice that my I knew already (usually in badly written, less clear versions splattered with garish ads) but nothing to help with this outlier / corner case. I suppose it will take time before robust knowledge to deal with exceptions emerges into the public domain - meanwhile, lots of motherhood and apple-pie.

The reformat was not so simple. I used Disk Utility to delete the APFS container after an initial erase left only APFS format options. The drive would not then remount, even with several reboots. It did not show at all in the Disk Utility interface but I could see it in Terminal with the following command (so knew it was not toast):

diskutil apfs list

The disk eventually did appear as I navigated around Disk Utility (I possibly hit Mount but as the drive wasn't available to be selected in the interface I'm not sure how that helped so forgive me for being vague) and I reformatted using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The drive then offered itself for Time Machine.

The backup did not take long but it is still encrypting (1TB drive, 20 hours later). When running Time Machine afresh on a new Mac, and adding to other backups on the same drive, the encryption was taken care of as the backup completed. I guess this time the disk required further preparation after its ill-fated foray into APFS (which makes sense) and I suspect, although cannot quite recall, that when I did my very first Time Machine backup on that drive some years ago it also took a long time.

Re 'backup backup drive', etc. and, as John said, having more than one bodyguard —

• my Documents folder is replicated real-time to iCloud, which recently and without a glitch restored all saved data to two new machines – good if someone steals my laptop;
• my entire Home folder is backed up incrementally every hour to Amazon AWS S3 Glacier using Arq – helpful if I delete / damage stuff inadvertently myself or want to find older documents;
• and now I again have a working Time Machine backup – for emergency whole-system restores, but I doubt I shall need to rely on this much in the future.

Thanks, Kappy, for this reply and your many other helpful submissions on the forums. I had read through those links.

On restore without Time Machine, I have always been able to go into backups.backupdb, navigate to the file I want and copy / paste it to a new location. This was the easiest way of retrieving files from a (hidden) Library archive.

My problem is not backing up an APFS volume with Time Machine. Rather, I am trying to recover the Time Machine archive files from an external disk that I foolishly converted from HFS+ to APFS. From what I can see it is impossible but I wondered whether there might be a utility or some other way of getting to the files that now seem to be hidden by aliases (which under HFS+ before the erroneous conversion were the hard directory links that Time Machine could read).

Thanks, Kappy. In the past I have browsed through backups.backupdb from the 'Latest' alias and copy individual files without a problem (they have been accessible and uncorrupted) so was hoping that with APFS I might have been able to do this, perhaps with a utility that 'saw beyond' through the symbolic links.

You may be right. I suspect there is no way of accessing a Time Machine archive on a (recently converted) APFS disk and that it will be necessary to reformat the drive, thus losing the data. If anyone out there has other ideas, though, it will be good to know. Thanks all.

Thanks, John. Whilst I've never had any problems using Finder to copy documents from backups.backupdb and have not read anything online where people said they had specific issues with this, your points are well taken - clearly, where possible it makes sense to follow standard practice.

With my question here I'm trying to look beyond the 'standard' way of doing things - necessarily, because I know that won't work - and ask whether anyone has experience of accessing files behind the symbolic links (that Time Machine hard directory links got converted to) on a drive that's formatted with APFS. I'f be grateful for any ideas anyone has.