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Time Machine backups gone missing

I'm trying to find some lost photos from Time Machine, but for some unbelievable reason, Time Machine only has backups from March 1st 2018 even if I've had it set up for years and years.

Is there some way I could recover my old backups to be able to find the files I'm missing?

My setup has been using two external HD's for Time Machine: a network drive (MyBookLive) and a FW drive connected to the computer (AUDIO). I've already gone through the backups on the other drive, but as there's a big gap of no backups in the time period I'd need I was hoping I could find them on the network drive. The drive has never been even close to full.

On the AUDIO -drive I can find a TimeMachine-folder and see all the backups as separate files and folders.

But on the network-drive I have two folders:

an empty folder called "TimeMachineBackup"
a folder called "TimeMachine" with only one large file "Myname - MacBookPro" 376,52 Gt

Is there any hope I could be able to dig out older backups from this network drive, as for some reason I don't have backups from the needed time period on the other drive.

Again, this setup and backups have certainly been running for years and years. I do not understand why my most recent backup is only a few days old!

Many thanks for your help!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), mid-2012

Posted on Mar 5, 2018 9:29 AM

Best reply

Tesserax

Level 10

148,453 points

Posted on Mar 7, 2018 8:20 AM

Having read up on the subject, I've come to realise that I probably did get a pop-up window at some point with

"Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."

Which I okayed, but I could never have imagined that creating a new backup means wiping out 6 years of data!!

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens if you"ok" this message. However, it should only delete the backup set for the currently connected computer. If you had made Time Machine backups for other Macs, they would should not be affected by this.

I'm still wondering why I have two different Time Machine -partitions on the disk:

TimeMachine - including only one sparsebundle backup file (which holds only backups from the last week)

TimeMachineBackups - which is totally empty

Is it time for me to accept my defeat?

In this case, TimeMachine is the logical volume name of your WD My Book Live device that is used by Time Machine. When Time Machine runs, it will first attempt to mount this volume. It then finds the sparsebundle for your computer's backup which is actually a disk image. It then mounts this image at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups. That's what the second item is ... so, here TimeMachine should only contain a single sparsebundle, which unfortunately, does not have any backups in it when the "new" backup was created.

The only thing I can offer at this point, is if this data is critical to you, you may need to hire a recovery specialist to see if they can recover the data. In the mean time you should stop using your WD device so that no additional data can overwrite them. Good luck!

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Time Machine backups gone missing

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