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Re: Time Machine anomaly

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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I haven't had this problem so just some general suggestions...

On 12/02/2015 11:22, Peter James wrote:
> To recap.  The file structure of my iMac became corrupted and I had to
> delete the contents of the hard disk using disk utilities and restore
> from Time Machine.  Time Machine is set to backup every hour and every
> day.
>
> When I came to restore from Time Machine I found to my horror that the
> last backup I could restore was the 28th of Ocotber 2102.  Thus I lost
> two and a half years backups.  I was mortified.
>
> I restored to that date and then explored Time Machine.  TM prefs showed

Firstly, stop using the TM backup drive except for attempting to restore 
from it: you don't want a fresh run of TM to overwrite anything. Use a 
new hard drive for your new backups from now on.

> it was set to hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for
> the past month, and weekly backups for all  previous months.  And that
> the latest backup available to me was the 28th of October 2012.
>
> However, clicking on the icon for TM on my desktop I am able to examine
> backups from today until back to 28 October 2012, and yet I can't
> restore them.

Sounds like part of the disk is corrupted, but that the index is okay.

When your normal drive got corrupted - do you know why? E.g. did the 
disk fail? The reason for asking is that if the main drive was corrupted 
by something, and you know not what, then your TM backup drive may also 
have been corrupted since it was connected at the time.

> I can't be too sure on this point, but round about October 2012 my
> Seagate hard disk was replaced by Apple under a general  warranty even
> though the computer was three years of age.  Some sort of problem with
> Seagate HD's I understand.

Seems unlikely to be related, but I can't rule it out. I would have 
thought that if TM was going to throw a wobbly about the changed drive 
then it would have done so at the time.

> The other oddity is that although my TM external disk shows up in
> DiskUtilities there is no way that I can run diagnostic checks on the
> external disk.

Is the Verify Disk button missing / greyed out or does it not run to 
completion? If the latter, then it sounds like a fairly major problem 
with the drive. Contacting a specialist recovery company is probably the 
next step.

> I would be most grateful for any advice or help anyone can give me on
> this problem.

A long shot but... there's a free disk / file analysis program called 
Grand Perspective which primarily shows you which files/folders are 
taking up all the space.
<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net>

However, it has an option to compare backups side-by-side so you can see 
what has changed. This may shed light on what is happening with your 
backup. The help page for this functionality is at the link below.
<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/HelpDocumentation/HowToAnalyseTimeMachineBackups.html>

HTH
-- 
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey
England
(bruce at scorecrow dot com)

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Thread

Time Machine anomaly pfjames2000@googlemail.com (Peter James) - 2015-02-12 11:22 +0000
  Re: Time Machine anomaly Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> - 2015-02-12 10:28 -0500
    Re: Time Machine anomaly Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2015-02-13 09:20 +1300
  Re: Time Machine anomaly Bruce Horrocks <07.013@scorecrow.com> - 2015-02-12 20:54 +0000
  Re: Time Machine anomaly {$PW$}@womar.co.uk (Paul Womar) - 2015-02-12 22:10 +0000
  Re: Time Machine anomaly "John Varela" <newlamps@verizon.net> - 2015-02-13 02:23 +0000
  Re: Time Machine anomaly David Arnstein <arnstein+usenet@pobox.com> - 2015-03-04 00:09 +0000

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